ABSTRACT
Demography and sectarianism Demographic concerns in Northern Ireland have been intensifying as the numbers of Protestants and Catholics have converged over recent decades (to respectively about 53 per cent and 44 per cent of the total population in 2001), while at the same time the ‘two communities’ have allegedly been ‘growing apart’. Contrary to Kertzer’s and Arel’s (2002) ‘postmodern constructivism’, the Census in Ireland did not ‘create’ the religious categories of ethno-nationalism; these stem from the sectarian policies of the Tudor English state during the Protestant Reformation and long pre-date regular censuses. But the 1911 Census was central to the creation of the Northern Ireland statelet and the abuse of census data has developed into an art form. Demography as sectarian head-counting has been a built-in feature of popular politics in Northern Ireland since Ireland’s partition in 1920. Protestants in the
nine-county province of Ulster had provided the main ‘unionist’ opposition to Irish nationalist ‘Home Rule’ (to them ‘Rome rule’ due to Ireland’s Roman Catholic majority); but when they could no longer block ‘Home Rule’ their ‘least-worst’ option became the partition opt-out. However, the most recent (1911) Census showed that in Ulster the Protestants (assumed to be unionist) had only a small majority over Catholics (assumed nationalists), 56 per cent to 44 per cent. And so the British government as the imperial nationalist power imposed a ‘settlement’ (Anderson and O’Dowd 2007): it delimited Northern Ireland not as all nine Ulster counties but as six, the largest area it was thought could be securely held in full union with Britain (though two of the six had small but clear Catholic majorities: Fermanagh 56 per cent Catholic, Tyrone 55 per cent). Some 300,000 Protestants in the three excluded Ulster counties and the rest of Ireland were ‘sacrificed’ (or ‘thrown out of the lifeboat’ as they saw it) to secure for the roughly 900,000 Protestants within a six-county Northern Ireland a ‘safe’ two-to-one majority. But this majority is ‘safe’ no longer. Interestingly, the 2001 figure for Catholics within the ‘six counties’, 44 per cent, is now virtually the same as the figure for Catholics in the ‘nine counties’ in 1911; and Northern Ireland’s six-county Protestant percentage has now dropped from roughly 66 per cent to 53 per cent (below the figure of 56 per cent for Ulster as a whole that was considered an ‘unsafe’ majority in 1911). This simple fact has been misleadingly perceived as an imminent threat/promise of ending the political union with Britain; but not surprisingly it has had profound and reverse (albeit difficult to quantify) effects on the ‘political confidence’ of unionists and nationalists and politics within Northern Ireland. It is a major reason for the intensified preoccupation with demography. From the 1920s to 1960s, the two-to-one Protestant majority was maintained because the generally higher birth rate among Catholics was offset by their relatively higher emigration rate – itself a function of various individual and institutional forms of socio-economic, employment and political discrimination practised mainly by Protestants/unionists. But in the 1970s, with Catholic emigration rates decreasing (helped by Direct Rule from London), and the higher Catholic birth rate continuing, there was a substantial convergence in the relative numbers in Northern Ireland. Indeed many commentators predicted a Catholic majority with numerical parity or near parity expected from the 1991 Census and an outright majority by 2001. In the event, Catholics increased to (only?) about 42 per cent in 1991, and the 44 per cent figure a decade later suggested a marked decline in the rate of relative growth.
