For the first time, Catholics form the majority in Northern Ireland

WWhichever way it is portrayed – and there is a lot of filming, depending on your political leanings – the results of last year’s Northern Ireland referendum that are now released mark an important moment for the two biggest identity blocs out there: unionists, who want to belong to the UK, and so-called nationalists, most of whom want to re-establish unification of Ireland. For the first time since the founding of Northern Ireland more than a hundred years ago, the number of citizens of Catholic ancestry, at 45.7 per cent, exceeded the proportion of those who identify themselves as Protestant or grew up as Protestant (43.5 per cent). In 2012, the ratio was still 45.1 to 48.4 percent.

In setting the boundary with the Irish Free State in 1921, the commission in charge referred to the 1911 census, according to which the proportion of Protestants in the nine counties of Ulster was 56 percent compared to 44 percent Catholics. Feeling that this majority was too narrow, politicians in what is often mistakenly referred to as a “Protestant nation of the Protestant people” (Jim Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland is said to have said so) decided in favor of partition, with a majority of three Catholic counties giving up Catholicism It manipulates the electoral districts in favor of the Protestants because it would have been better “if two-thirds of the passengers had saved themselves than by drowning them all”. For a long time, Catholics made up only a third of the population. And for a long time they were disadvantaged when it came to job allocation, social housing or voting rights.