ABSTRACT
In 1613 the government of James VIII granted the region to the liveried companies of the City of London and ordered a fortified city to be built on the site of ancient monastic settlements by the River Foyle; the city was to be known as Londonderry in recognition of the connection with the City. However, the latter turned out to be reluctant colonists who never fully fulfilled the terms of their contract, which included clearing the area of native Irish and 'planting' it with loyal English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Some historical sources put the proportions of Scots to English in the mid-seventeenth century as high as 20:1 in the city (Simpson 1847: 54). By the 1830s the proportions of Scots, English and Irish were approximately 25:25:50 (Colby 1837: 191), and from then on the Irish (Catholic) proportion increased rapidly as the population grew and the city industrialised, albeit on a smaller scale than Belfast (Lacy 1990: 169; Thomas 1997b: 77). Currently, the Catholic:Protestant proportions are approximately 75:25 (DHSS 1991). Ethnic segregation of Catholics and Protestants (A. Robinson 1969; Bell 1987, 1990), reinforced by competition for jobs and other resources, has been a feature of the local scene since the early 1800s (Lacy 1990: 167-87). The city was one of the most sharply segregated urban areas in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s (Poole 1982) and the Troubles after 1969 led to the migration of about two-thirds of the city's Protestants from the west
bank of the River Foyle to the east, making segregation today firmer than ever (Lacy 1990: 270).
