One Island, October 1994

No Certainty of Catholic North

by Professor Paul Compton, Queen's University of Belfast

The rapid growth in the size of the Catholic population since 1961 has given rise to the widespread belief that the Protestant majority [in Northern Ireland] is in imminent danger of being overturned.

On the face of it, the facts would appear to bear this out. The Catholic birth-rate continues to outstrip the non-Catholic rate, while the traditional migration differential whereby many more Catholics left the province has given way to something much closer to parity.

In addition, recent censuses of population, which provide the only headcount province-wide by denomination, have become unreliable due to the reluctance of people to state their religion and have been the subject of wild speculation.

Hence, at the extremes, the 1991 census findings could be interpreted as showing that the Protestant population has already dropped to 50% of the total - if one glosses over those with no religion and those who refused to state their religion - or that the Catholic total is already in excess of 45% - if one assumes that all those who did not state a denomination were Catholics.

What conclusions can therefore justifiably be drawn from the '91 census? The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the Catholic total now lies within the range 38.4-45.7% and the non-Catholic total, including those with no religious affiliation, in the range 54.3-61.6%.

However, careful analysis, which involves the apportionment of those not stating a religious persuasion to a presumed denomination, can help narrow the probable range within which the proportions lie. At the previous two censuses - 1971 and 1981 - most of those refusing to state a denomination were clearly Catholic; 1991 was very different however. Now, instead of using the census as a political football, Catholic community leaders saw the advantages of maximising their numbers.

The corollary of this is that most of the non-statement in 1991 was accounted for by Protestants. We cannot go into the estimation procedures here, but the corrected figures for 1991 show Catholics making up somewhere between 41 and 42% of the total, which is broadly in line with Jardine's recent independent estimate.

Non-Catholics therefore constituted 58-59% of the population, of which around 4% were either of no religious persuasion or were members of a non-Christian religion. In terms of absolute numbers, these proportions translate into a population of around 650,000 Catholics and 928,000 non-Catholics.

In themselves, these figures tell us nothing about how the province's population may be expected to develop in the future. For this we need to take note of the recent temporal trend, presented in the accompanying table. This shows the Catholic proportion growing by about two percentage points per decade since 1951, from 34.4 to the current estimate of 41-42% of the total population and represents and absolute increase of 180,000 persons over the 40 year period.

By contrast, the increase of the non-Catholic population over the same period has been a more modest 28,000 with a tendency for numbers to stagnate or even decline since 1971. Clearly, if this trend were to continue Catholics would eventually outnumber the non-Catholic population. The important point though is that this event is not imminent; in the absence of something wholly unexpected, we are in fact looking 40 to 50 years into the future before this is likely to happen, provided current trends persist.

Yet the assumption that the demographic future of Northern Ireland will be simple extrapolation of current trends is a dubious proposition especially since the underlying factors, most notably the fertility and migration rates of the respective populations, are themselves dynamic quantities that move with the flux of society.

In trying to arrive at a realistic scenario of the future, we therefore need to understand what is happening at this level. Future migration is difficult to predict but we would expect the net outflow of population that came to a temporary halt during the recession to resume once the economic recovery in Britain is fully established.

There is no reason to think that the denominational breakdown of this outward movement will undergo any basic change - i.e. the Catholic outflow will continue to be higher among the economically active and the Protestant outflow higher among student leavers who tend not to return to the province on the completion of their studies. The most probable outcome is one in which there continues to be a roughly equal net loss of Catholic and Protestant numbers. In this event the disparity in growth rates that arises from the differences in the birth rates of the two populations is likely to become the crucial factor determining the future course of the denominational balance. It is here, in fact, that we find most change occurring with mounting evidence of a decline in the Catholic high rate, which will put back even further in time the emergence of a Catholic majority.

In substantiation of this, we would point to the one-third decline in the birth rate in the Irish Republic since the early 1980s, which is essentially a decline in the birth rate of Irish Catholics. Since Catholics North and South share the same basic demographic character, one would expect the decline in the South to be replicated among Catholics in Northern Ireland, albeit perhaps after a time lag reflecting the rather different circumstances of Northern Catholics.

Although this argument cannot be fully substantiated with hard statistics, the sharp fall in the Northern Ireland birth rate since 1986, down from 18.0 to 15.1 per 1000 in 1993 is clearly consistent with this interpretation. This fall is unlikely to be a product of Protestant birth rate decline since this tends to mirror the British pattern. Further evidence of Catholic birth rate decline comes from the baptismal data published in the Vatican's statistical yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio. Since Catholics must have their children baptised, the number of Catholic baptisms in Northern Ireland more or less equates with the number of Catholic births.

Although our data stops in 1987, by imputation it would appear that the Catholic birth rate dropped from around 24 to 21.5 per 1000 between 1980 and 1987, while the Protestant rate remained essentially static.

A similar inference can be drawn from the 1991 census age breakdown by denomination, which suggests that Catholic births rose to just over 50% of the total in the early and mid-1980s, but have since fallen back to less than a half. This data also suggests that the Catholic birth rate has now dropped to less than 20 per 1000. If the Catholic birth rate in the North falls as far and as rapidly as that in the South, there is a strong chance that Catholics will never form a majority in Northern Ireland. Indeed, since the experience of other Catholic countries suggests that Catholic birth rates fall very far once decline sets in (e.g. the lowest birth rate in Europe at the moment is in Italy) this may well be the most likely future for the Province despite current evidence suggesting the contrary.

Moreover, even if a Catholic majority were to emerge, the Protestant heartland of Antrim, East Londonderry, North Down and North Armagh would still remain. What is clear though is that the balance will continue to shift in favour of Catholics over the next decade or so, if only because of the inbuilt growth momentum within the Catholic population. It could well be that an equilibrium is eventually established in which both groups are more or less of the same size.

As a final point the religious demography of the province only provides a backdrop to the stage on which political processes are played out. The thing that actually matters is how the population would vote in a constitutional referendum.