Reporting of census has put too much emphasis on religion

I have been very concerned about how both the BBC and RTE TV news at lunchtime yesterday responded to the just released census data for Northern Ireland. They both put a total emphasis on religion data.

The census has found that only 29.1% of people in Northern Ireland identify as ‘Irish only’. This is a level similar to that of support for Provisional Sinn Fein.

So much for all the ‘border poll’ — much less the ‘united Ireland’ — talk.

A total of 31.9% of respondents are ‘British only’, and another 8% are ‘British and Northern Irish’. That is a combined total of 39.9%, which is 10.8% more than the ‘Irish only’ category, while 19.8% are ‘Northern Irish only’. The latter figure also echoes the level of support for Alliance.

Even the combined ‘Northern Irish only’ and ‘Irish only’ categories come to only 48.9% — not a majority.

And this nationality breakdown — not the ‘religious’ one — is what alone is politically and constitutionally significant, but it is revealing that in 2021 the Roman Catholic box was chosen by 45.7 % — 16.6 % more than the ‘Irish only’ box.

The Protestant/other Christian box has declined to now 43.5 %, but the ‘none’ box is up to 9.3 %, and as the RC box is up by 1% , the ‘None’ box is clearly significantly ex-Protestants, while the Prot estant decline reflects the very disturbing — and ongoing — mass exodus of the young.

They go in large numbers ‘across the water’ either on leaving school, or on finishing college within Northern Ireland. They clearly feel that NI has now become (in David Trimble’s striking Nobel Prize speech phrase) a ‘cold place’ for young Prots.

The Union itself is clearly not in any doubt – determined Ulster resistance to Home Rule (in 1912 or 1886 or 1921) was never about a) either enforcing — or privileging — Protestantism via the state or the law, or the level of church-attendance, or the level of orthodox Reformed belief, but all about both b) rejecting 32-County Home Rule as Rome Rule, and c) also preserving their long-established, cherished — and identifying — links with Great Britain — links in every field (including in voluntary military service as well as economically).

The majority in Ulster never saw itself as an overseas English Province(or civil garrison) but as having its own distinct and legitimate historic identity, which was close to (but never identical with) that of Great Britain.

If GB ever chose to abandon Ulster, in either 2022 or 1912, 1886 or 1921, that could never turn Ulster into ‘The Fourth Green Field’.

Nor has even Brexit — even though rejected in the referendum by a (very rare) cross-Community majority in NI (including, as a QUB survey revealed, by one in four DUP voters).

Ulster is not Scotland where the division on the Union is still very close, and neither is it simply (or mainly) ‘Irish’.

Recognition of the current sacred values of ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culturalism’ ought to lead the south to unconditionally accept Ulster as it alone chooses to be — as different, both culturally and constitutionally, not as some temporarily-separated ‘lost Irish Province’, and so as eternall – entitled to freely determine its own destiny.

Geography is never destiny.

Tom Carew, Dublin