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

by Tim Pat Coogan

While there was no official policy of discrimination against Protestants, the ethos of the south became unwelcoming to aspects of Protestantism. Ethos, economics, emigration, a lower birth rate, the change in administration all played their part in making the south’s small Protestant population become smaller still. It fell from 327, 171 in 1911 to roughly 130, 000 fifty years later. When James Craig declared that the Belfast parliament was a ‘protestant parliament for a protestant people’, his hearers understood that custom and usage meant that the Protestants got and would continue to get the jobs and the houses at the expense of their Catholic neighbours. The southern state was much more benign and democratic than that. But it was nevertheless a benign, democratic Roman Catholic state.