The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Thus, the 1991 returns are the first trustworthy figures for Northern Ireland’s population shifts to emerge in over twenty years. The figures shatter a number of cherished beliefs about the religious divide in the Six Counties. The classic assumption was that the population was divided in the ratio of two thirds Protestant to one third Catholic. In fact, the Catholics have risen to 43.1% of the population of 1, 577, 836 people. The much talked of ‘million Protestants’ are now below the 900, 000 mark and falling. These numbers are not so much affected by a larger Catholic birth rate, which has fallen to Protestant levels with the aid of the pill, as by an accelerating Protestant emigration. This is most obvious in the area of education where Protestant parents have been increasingly sending their children to British universities, with the result that Queen’s University, Belfast, for example is now 65% Catholic. Catholics, many of them from the Republic, are swamping the Protestants in the university colleges of Colraine and the Queen’s Constituent College, Magee. This is particularly ironic as it was the refusal of the Stormont Government of the day to extend the University facilities to Magee which led to Derry’s first major civil rights protest, the motor cavalcade to Stormont.