Catholics Outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the First Time (Published 2022) (2024)

LONDON — For the first time, Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, census figures released on Thursday show — confirmation of a long-anticipated but still striking shift with implications for the region’s future.

The result could intensify debate, at an already politically fraught moment, about the region seceding from the United Kingdom and reunifying Ireland, but experts have also cautioned against equating religion with political affiliation.

“With Catholics coming out now in the plurality, that really is quite significant because of the grounds on which Northern Ireland was created to begin with,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. “But I would immediately point to the dangers of reading political opinions on top of that.”

According to the census numbers, some 45.7 percent of Northern Ireland’s population is or was raised Catholic, while 43.5 percent are Protestant or raised in another Christian religion. Since the formation of Northern Ireland — which remained part of the United Kingdom when the island was partitioned in 1921, while the larger part of the island became an independent Irish state — Protestants have outnumbered Catholics.

Those who identified as currently religious were lower, with Catholics making up 42.3 percent of the population, Protestants making up 37.3 percent, other religions 1.3 percent and 17.4 percent indicating ‘No religion,’ pointing to an increasingly secular population.

“It changes the balance, more than a hundred years after Northern Ireland was engineered deliberately to have a Protestant majority,” said Theresa Reidy, a professor of political scientist at University College Cork. “It probably moves the conversation on Irish unity a little bit closer, but there is still a good deal that would need to change.”