Northern Ireland’s Catholics now outnumber Protestants
LONDON — For the first time, Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, census figures released on Thursday show — confirmation of a long-anticipated but still striking shift with implications for the region’s future.
The result could intensify debate about the region seceding from Britain and reunifying Ireland, but experts have also cautioned against equating religion with political affiliation.
According to the census numbers, some 45.7% of Northern Ireland’s population is or was raised Catholic, while 43.5% are Protestant or raised in another Christian religion. Since the formation of Northern Ireland — which remained part of the United Kingdom when the island was partitioned in 1921 — Protestants have outnumbered Catholics.
Those who identified as currently religious were lower, with Catholics making up 42.3% of the population, Protestants making up 37.3%, other religions 1.3%, and 17.4% indicating “no religion,” pointing to an increasingly secular population.
“It changes the balance, more than a hundred years after Northern Ireland was engineered deliberately to have a Protestant majority,” said Theresa Reidy, a professor of political scientist at University College Cork. “It probably moves the conversation on Irish unity a little bit closer, but there is still a good deal that would need to change.”
The Good Friday Agreement, a key 1998 peace accord between the British and Irish governments and political parties in Northern Ireland, does have provisions for a referendum to potentially reunify the island, though it does not detail how that would work.
But the shifting demographics do existentially undermine the rationale behind Northern Ireland’s creation a century ago, when religion was considered a reliable indicator of support for either continued British rule or for a united, independent Ireland.
After World War I, the weakened British Empire faced an armed campaign for independence in Ireland. A strong majority in Ireland — mostly Roman Catholics who identified ethnically with the island’s original Gaelic inhabitants — supported independence. But a regional majority of Protestant unionists in parts of the northeastern province of Ulster remained fiercely loyal to predominantly Protestant Britain.
The British government agreed to withdraw from the nationalist south, which became an independent state, and the island was partitioned. Six of the island’s 32 counties were carved out to form Northern Ireland, where Protestants outnumbered Catholics by about 2-to-1, and remained a part of Britain.
But nearly since its founding, Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority has been slowly eroding. At first, this was often attributed to the Catholic Church’s opposition to family planning, and the resulting large Catholic families. But there were also economic factors at play, like the decline in industrial jobs, which were held predominantly by Protestants.