There are many reasons to be cheerful, even in hard-pressed recessionary times, but for the good people of Northern Ireland the recent much-headlined and globally discussed intolerance of incomers is not one of them.

InvestNI, the inward investment arm of the Northern Ireland government, will doubtless despair but now redouble its efforts to rebalance media coverage of displaced and disillusioned Romanians and other minorities.   ‘Inward investment’, after decades of isolation, is an economic imperative – although InvestNI’s fashionable use of the term FDI is, in a country foreign to incautious use of the language, an indicator of distance between leaders and those they would wish to lead.

In my altogether more optimistic editorial (‘Why NI?’ January 2008) I set out the reasons for investing in Northern Ireland – the scale of opportunity, rich seams of home-grown talent, pioneering roots, the goodwill of a distant Diaspora.  Despite mishaps along the way those reasons are more-than-ever valid.

But in that article I described an earlier phase of Northern Ireland’s economic recovery as ‘Isolation re-melded as silo-nation’.  The depressing media coverage of the past week reminds us that, whilst governments can legislate and pursue processes for economic development, societal get-well plans are altogether more difficult to deliver.  Travelling towards tolerance from hard-fought decades of determined resistance will always be a haphazard journey.

The impacts of these distances, the gaps between economic and societal development, between governments and governed, between haves and have-nots, between the connected and the ‘doubly-disconnected’, has been mapped with sobering seriousness by the research team of Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in their timely publication of ‘The Spirit Level’.

The data is undeniable, ‘More-equal societies almost always do better’, and the impacts of real (and perceived) inequalities can be measured across umpteen facets of society – in drug usage, violence, education, mental health, obesity, child wellbeing, anxiety, teen-age pregnancies, trust, social mobility and life expectancy.  Despite vast investment in health services, when the distance between equality and inequality lengthens, the benefits of economic growth no longer deliver correspondingly positive societal developments.  Some would say that this is the true cost of so-called ‘free’ markets.

Throwing money at dealing with the impacts may help cope with the accidents and emergencies of societal casualties but does not address underlying causes.  Whether it’s the yawning gap between what is said and what is heard, the fear of differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the very local versus the wider viewpoints, or the perceptions and realities of unfairness, the stretch, that acceptance that we call ‘tolerance’, starts to break more of the strands that bind us all together.

As in England, where this week the Commission for Rural Communities is launching its ‘Mind the Gap’, campaign for a more equitable approach to Digital Britain, the issues are not about absolutes but more about ranges – the relativities, the distances, the extremes.  It is not surprising that diversity, the fuel of innovation and fresh thinking, is, frankly, foreign to those parts of NI society who believe that they’ve already been left behind.

If, on this journey towards tolerance, your audience starts out from ‘never, never’ land, the effort needed to pull together really does demand exceptional leadership, and time, and patience, and remarkably good hearing, and inclusiveness.