Catholics in Northern Ireland feel less Irish
Catholics appear less wedded to Irishness than Protestants are to Britishness, the Census has revealed.
The latest figures from the 2011 Census were released yesterday, providing the most reliable evidence yet of just where the loyalties of Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants lie.
And it seems to undermine the traditional assumption that Catholics are almost uniformly Irish nationalists.
Only 57 per cent of those who are Catholic or were brought up as Catholics ticked the box marked ‘Irish’.
On the other hand, 80 per cent of Protestants ticked the box marked ‘British’.
Meanwhile, large minorities of both communities said their national identity was ‘Northern Irish’.
Although public polls have been taken in the past on the subject, this was the first time the official government Census posed the question of national identity to all of Ulster’s 1.8m inhabitants.
In addition, the figures show that Catholic children clearly outnumber Protestant ones, suggesting that the slender Protestant majority in the Province could be lost in a generation or so.
But there are a raft of other issues which the Census helps shed light on, including matters of health and the labour market.
In these categories, there was evidence that Catholics are enduring worse unemployment rates than Protestants, whilst Catholics also recorded disproportionately high levels of ill health compared with their Protestant counterparts.
