IRISH men die younger. Their life expectancy is one of the lowest in the western world. Shown the red card at 72 - which naturally means many of us won't make it to anything like that age - Irish males tend to make for an untimely exit six years before mna na hEireann, who go on strutting their feminine stuff to a creditable 78.
When hapless Hibernian males check out for the great ceili in the sky in 1996, they're not best pleased to learn from a bragging ancestor that the life expectancy of the Irish male in 192b - 58 at birth - was among the highest in the world. Subsequently relegated to the lower divisions, today's prime plucked sons of Eireann can understandably feel miffed. The more mean spirited among them could harbour eternal resentment upon hearing that Irish women's longevity had no significant advantage over men until as recently as the 1940s.
Throughout the world women outlive men. While British males can expect to live to 73.5 years - a year longer than the 72.6 years of their Irish counterparts - the women of Britannia go on watching Coronation Street until 79.1 years. The life expectancy at birth for Swedish males is 75.1 years, while their female counterparts live to 81.6 years.
The good news - if you can call it that - is that males aren't always to blame. There is a disproportionate male death rate even in the womb and in early infancy. According to Prof Tom O'Dowd of the department of Community Health and General Practice at Trinity College: "More males are miscarried than females, more males are born with congenital abnormalities than females and the mortality rate in their first year of life is higher for males than for females".
And now for the bad news. Men are very often to blame for diminishing the quality of their lives and hastening that grim ferryman. Under the guise of bravado, some oafs ignore even the basics of self care.
There are four main factors that contribute to needlessly lowering men's life expectancy. First, take the case of your average covert adolescent renegade repressed within the body of the suited and be cuffed middle aged businessman recklessly driving at speed.
His ilk are responsible for many an appalling accident. They account for a huge proportion of males who don't make it to tomorrow. On average, one male life is wiped out every single day in the Republic and a female life is annihilated every third day on our roads, often because some stud revved his engine that day rather than his conscience.
Males risk busting, rather than using, their brains: what they don't use, they often lose, mushed to a paste for the want of wit. Males consistently refuse to wear bicycle helmets or appropriate head gear for contact sports even though skulls come a poor second to concrete and hurleys. It's questionable whether women take fewer risks. But males seem more prone to uncalculated risks. They pay a heavy price. As high a percentage of young men's deaths are due to violence and accidents as the percentage of middle aged and older men who die from circulatory diseases. To be fair, men's occupations such as building or mining are often more hazardous than women's, but even here unbridled testosterone contributes to needless grief.
A second modifiable cause of premature male deaths is cardiovascular diseases, often mindlessly self inflicted. Coronary heart disease (CHD) alone - excluding men who die of strokes - kills at least one in every three men. If the ranks of Irishmen were so depleted by a foreign army, surviving males would do their damnedest to combat the cursed enemy. Yet many Irish men know zilch about how to protect themselves against this all vanquishing killer.
Finlayson & McEwan's study in 1979 showed that some men with severe chest pain foolishly went out for a walk to see if it would go away and that 80 per cent needed a hefty nudge from their partner to go to the doctor.
DURING their childbearing years, women have greater protection against CHD because of their estrogen and progesterone. While men can't do anything about the male deficit they could combat CHD and strokes by arming themselves with low cholesterol, controlled blood pressure, regular exercise and a lean girth.
According to Tony Fahey of the ESRI "men eat, drink and smoke themselves to death". About three men die every day in Ireland because they're hooked on cigs. Women have the dubious accolade of catching up fast. Cecily Kelleher, Professor of Health Promotion at UCG, says "men have been getting the message about smoking much better than women". Already, more than one woman dies every day from smoking related illnesses. Some liberation that.
Finally, almost every day an Irishman commits suicide. Last year, every fifth day a young man between the ages of 15 and 24 entered seemingly unspeakable despair and ended it. Prof Bernadette Herity, Head of the Department of Public Health Medicine and Epidemiology at UCD, says that although depression is twice as high in women, men commit suicide in much greater numbers. Clearly, women ask for help. What a sad indictment of our culture that Irish sons, brothers and fathers so often bring their despair to a fatal end.