Northern Ireland's future isn't Catholic or Protestant (2024)

For the first time in Northern Ireland’s history, Catholics now outnumber Protestants. Census data on national identity and religious from 2021, which was published today, shows that Catholics born into or practising their religion make up 45.7 per cent of the population, with Protestants at 43.5 per cent. In the bleak zero-sum world of Irish confessional demographics, that translates into a headcount victory for those champing at the bit to end British rule there.

There’s no denying the figures are momentous. They will be gleefully weaponised by those who have no interest in a truly shared or reconciled future. But the headline numbers don’t reveal everything about the state of play in Northern Ireland.

Roman Catholicism has always been a majority religion in the Province since the Protestant religions split into multiple denominations. Still, added together, the census data shows that they number fewer than their Catholic neighbours by a small margin. The boost this will give to those in a hurry for unification is painfully obvious. But religious denomination by birth or practice is an increasingly uncertain marker of constitutional preference in contemporary Northern Ireland where, like everywhere else secularism is growing. The reality is that many people in Northern Ireland don’t identify as either Protestant or Catholic: the number of Northern Irish who follow ‘no religion’ number 330,983 or just over 17 per cent of the population. That figure was just 5.6 per cent in 2011. In the land of ‘dreary steeples’ this is a remarkable ascendancy.

This means that determining someone’s politics – in particular their view on a united Ireland – based on their religion at birth is becoming much harder to do. But the data on national identity, which also emerged this morning, is perhaps a better method of working out whether the tide is really turning in the favour of those who want the border between north and south to go.

The national identity question was introduced in the 2011 census. It allows people to say they are ‘British’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Northern Irish.’ Importantly, they are allowed to give more than one identity in line with the fraught and contested complexity of a post-conflict society. In 2011, a clear majority identified themselves as British only (40 per cent) as against Irish only (25 per cent) and Northern Irish (21 per cent).

The 2021 results reveal a narrowing gap. ‘British only’ is down to 31 per cent, ‘Irish only’ is now 29 per cent and ‘Northern Irish only’ is at 19 per cent. It’s clear that the national identity ‘winners’ in this three horse race are those who only identify as Irish, perhaps because of perceived unionist intransigence or Brexit. Yet it’s important to see that, in the population as a whole, the non-Irish ‘bloc’ is significantly larger at 50 per cent before other identities through migration etc are brought into play.

Northern Ireland’s future in a UK union can still be bright but it isn’t orange. However, neither is it green. There are no majorities by religious or national identity affiliation in Northern Ireland any more. Insteadthere are two main minorities. Bothmust reach out to and recruit the growing constituency of those who have abandoned religion and are sitting on the fence, if they are to have the political traction for either change or continuity.

Stand by for a welter of wilful misinterpretation and wishful thinking today from republicans, but the message is a stark one for Unionism, however it is spun. The days of demographic superiority by religious affiliation are gone. Any form of Unionist offer that relies on the accident of birth alone would be toast in a Unity referendum. The purely Protestant and Catholic states referred to by Craig and De Valera at Northern Ireland’s painful inception 100 years ago don’t exist on either side of the border. Modernity, abuse scandals and in-migration have transformed cosy sectarian certainties beyond all beliefs. A growing constituency which is younger, liberal and secular will be kingmakers in the constitutional future, not two sets of nominal Christians who have been cutting lumps out of each other in the last quarter of the last century over differences in a few lines of liturgy.