NI POLITICS: The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Orange?
Well, yes and no
As you might imagine, a certain mobile phone company, with the famous orange slogan, dropped it for its marketing in the Republic of Ireland. An alternative was sought lest the good citizens of the Free State might think that all those horrible bowler-hatted Prods from ‘the North’ would be heading their way.
It’s also a slogan that fewer Ulster Protestants are willing to use. Few are optimistic about their future. In just a generation they saw Stormont taken from them, were humiliated by their false friend Maggie Thatcher, saw all the IRA men being let out of prison and finally had to accept the loathsome Martin McGuinness as education minister — trying, as his final blow, to abolish their cherished grammar schools. As one wag put it, only 90% are depressed, the other 10% are positively suicidal.
If that wasn’t enough, they are living with an expanding Catholic population. The 1971 and 1981 censuses were disrupted by violence and the religious breakdowns were felt to be unreliable. When the 1991 census was published, the Catholic population had jumped from 35% in 1961 to 42% in 1991. Given a higher birth rate, an eventual Catholic majority was surely only a matter of time. For Protestant unionists it was the nightmare scenario. They had been told that the existence of the union depended on a voting majority. But that would guarantee their future only as long as they could keep a majority voting for it. Now they faced their trump card being trumped: standing not so much on narrow ground as narrowing ground. In the weeks before the Referendum on the Belfast Agreement in 1998, McGuinness confidently told his party that they only had to wait ‘until the children grow up’.
It’s difficult to underestimate this pessimism which runs from grassroots to Westminster representatives. The reality of demographic change shows itself in many ways. The mansions of Belfast’s select Malone area were built by the Victorian industrialists of the nineteenth century. Over the last twenty years it has been colonised by a rising Catholic middle class with its origins in the Falls. The nationalist vote in the South Belfast constituency has leapt from 5000 in 1992 to 13000 in 2001. The pattern of Catholic advance and Protestant retreat is reflected in the countryside. For example, Crumlin used to be a mainly Protestant village near Belfast International Airport where the former Unionist leader Lord Molyneaux still lives. Last year, after steady resettlement from west Belfast for a number of years, the village elected a Sinn Fein councillor. Orange parade routes don’t keep up with demography and the changes explain the tension during the marching season.
Gerry Adams once went to America and speculated that there would be a united Ireland by the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. It’s depressing that nearly a century since that event, nationalists still have no better means for unity than the Prods being out-bred. Nationalist commentators eagerly awaited the religious breakdown from the 2001 census that was published in December. Expectations were sky-high that Santa Claus was about to give them a voting majority within a decade and all they had to do was to wait. Press speculation in the days beforehand put Protestants at just below 50% with Catholics at 46/47% That balance would surely herald a Catholic majority by the 2011 census and a probable 51%-plus vote for Irish unity in the following referendum. The speculation was enough to unnerve some unionists. Jeffrey Donaldson raced into print to say that a majority in both communities would be needed for a united Ireland. It’s sensible in practice but it smacked of the panic within unionist ranks at what the census was going to say.
Demography is an inexact science, at which malevolent (and plain foolish) commentators make themselves look foolish. Neutral social geographers did not endorse the nationalist expectation and did not anticipate a Catholic majority due to the steadily falling Catholic birth rate. And so it came to pass, as Ian Paisley might sermonise, that when the census results finally came out, unionists were relieved and the nationalist pundits were left with egg on their faces. The actual figures were Protestants at 53.1% and Catholics at 43.8%, with the missing numbers made up not by a sudden shot of multi-culturalism, but by middle class Prods being silly. This means that the increase in the Catholic share of the population since 1991 is the not so terrifying figure of 1.8%. Not enough, in other words, for an eventual voting majority even in the most tedious of medium terms.
So unionists enjoyed their Christmas after all. But there remain some important questions for a future where Catholics are likely to going to continue to increase in numbers (before, admittedly, plateauing some distance short of Protestants) and where Paisleyism is about the eclipse the UUP to become the dominant voice of unionism. Amazingly in the furore surrounding the census next to no one paid much attention to (a.) Catholic support for the union and (b.) the sheer impracticality of a united Ireland.
To take (a.) first, figures vary from 15% to a massive 59% of Catholics being prepared to vote to keep themselves in the UK. That is a remarkable total given the widespread belief that Northern Ireland is evolving slowly towards a united Ireland. People tend to forget the Roman Catholic unionist vote that gave Enoch Powell his majority in South Down in several elections. But it’s also true that unionism has never really converted that figure into solid electoral support, let alone more than token party membership and activism. It needs to do so to keep council, Assembly and Westminster seats out of nationalist hands.
As for (b.), some nationalists claim that Britain, the EU and America would be prepared to bankroll a newly united Ireland until it got on its feet. There is something touchingly naïve about this. It isn’t going to happen: if Northern Ireland needs a subsidy from the taxes of a population of 60 million to run, how would a population of 5 million possibly raise the same subsidy to keep ‘schools-and-hospitals’ functioning at the same level? When they attempt to talk economics, nationalists come unstuck very quickly. There is simply no conceivable economic case now, or at any time in the foreseeable future. That’s why they don’t try to make it. That makes the union safe.
The census will have a positive effect in soothing unionist fears. It will also prompt republican soul-searching. But it does mean that Northern Ireland will continue to be different from what it was in the past. It kills off old sectarian unionism because that’s simply no longer capable of defending a union where the religions are broadly balanced. But can unionism adapt to change?
— The Watchman
StormontWatch, January 21, 2003 12:12 AM