Republican News · Thursday 16 January 2002

Now you see it, now you don't

The unionist majority, the census and the electoral register

---

LAURA FRIEL takes a closer look at just how the percentages annonced for the census in the Six Counties were achieved, revealing the precarious nature of the statistical analysis offered

---

British Cabinet papers, recently released under the 30-year rule, revealed the British government of 1972 seriously considering repartition as a method of maintaining unionist domination in the north of Ireland.

Faced with a nationalist community demanding equality and citizenship, and fair share of housing, employment and right to vote three decades ago, the British government considered recreating an overwhelming unionist majority by opting for less than the Six Counties.

After all, this had worked in the 1920s, when Carson and Craig had rejected an offer of nine in favour of six counties and in the process redefined 'Ulster', once a nine-county province integral to Ireland, now a six-county offshore province of Great Britain.

Carson and Craig turned down nine counties because it had a 43% Catholic population on the grounds that unionist domination could not be assured with such a significant Catholic population. A nine-county Ulster would be unstable and 'ungovernable', Craig told a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council.

But when, 50 years later, the north of Ireland plunged into another political crisis, the then British Prime Minister Edward Heath had flinched at the prospect of forcibly expelling tens of thousands of Catholics, many living in Belfast, as a means of securing unionist domination on a four and a bit-county basis. But repartition was to be reconsidered again, this time by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

To shore up unionist domination in the 1970s and '80s the British government opted for direct political control, military occupation and mass repression. But when the shooting stopped, the British government was still facing the dilemma of creating political stability in the north.

Worse still, despite 30 years of repression, the northern nationalist community instead of being diminished and demoralised, remained organised and focused. Out of this reality the Good Friday Agreement and its vision of power sharing emerged.

But power sharing is anathema to unionism. Through the mechanism of a six-county state, unionists had been promised domination and that is what they have consistently sought to defend.

Unionists are often portrayed as territorial; loyalist violence is often linked to a notion of Catholic/nationalist encroachment; but the fact that they opted for six rather than nine and considered repartition on a four-county basis undermines this notion.

Unionists are not defending territory but power, it's not geography that preoccupies unionism but domination. The imposition of partition was merely the mechanism through which unionists sought and maintained political, economic and military domination, in perpetuity, they hoped.

Power sharing is anathema to unionism. Through the mechanism of a six-county state, unionists had been promised domination and that is what they have consistently sought to defend

As republicans, it comes as no surprise that power sharing is a difficult prospect for unionists to accept. Democracy and equal citizenship with their Catholic neighbours should not terrify unionists but it does. It does because it requires change and transition, and unionists have traditionally staked their future upon a strategy of no change, no accommodation, no 'surrender'.

Last September, the Ulster Unionist Party finally capitulated to unionist rejectionism and threatened to scupper the power sharing institutions. The British government responded by suspending the Assembly.

Of course, David Trimble, and apparently also Tony Blair, would have preferred to keep the Assembly while excluding Sinn Féin. The exclusion of the largest nationalist party in the north would allow the appearance of power sharing to continue without the need of actually sharing power.

In such a scenario, with over half of the nationalist electorate disenfranchised, the SDLP was merely being offered a seat at the unionist table, and they knew it. The SDLP declined and refused to play their part in the political recreation of a unionist 'majority'.

But if political exclusion is off the agenda, for the time being at least, the quest to create and maintain unionist domination through the operation of a 'majority' is far from abandoned. Securing a unionist 'majority' ideologically, statistically and electorally has once again become an increasing preoccupation of British rule in Ireland.

But without the political climate to tolerate a return to overt repression and unable to artificially recreate another unionist majority through repartition, the task is neither straightforward nor certain of success.

Ideologically, the notion of 'majority' rule and the 'majority' community has a history as long as the imposition of the Six-County state. The fact that unionists were and remain a minority within the island of Ireland and an even smaller minority within Britain did not detract from their status as a 'majority'.

This status, artificially created within the context of the Six Counties, became the defining ideological notion within which, in the interests of continuing British rule, sectarian domination could be and was legitimised and maintained.

If direct rule and military occupation diminished the importance of the operation of this 'majority', the Good Friday Agreement and its power sharing institutions have once again placed it centre stage.

But the demographic changes of the last 80 years, with its steady increase in the proportion of Catholics living in the northern state, means that unionism fears it can no longer claim its political dominance through an overwhelming numerical majority, even within the Six Counties.

As the demographic gap increasingly closes, unionist and British officials have sought other notions of 'majority' to sustain unionist domination. The primary notion has been that of the unionist veto.

Progress towards democracy and equality, it is increasingly being suggested, should be subject to a 'majority' within unionism. In effect, power to deny, to stop, to veto, will be in the hands of a minority within the island of Ireland, a minority within Britain and eventually a minority even within the Six Counties.

Of course, the notion of the right to veto has a long history within unionism but more recently it has emerged within the British agenda and, more worrying, has even been recognised by the Dublin government.

Former Secretary of State John Reid's notion of a 'cold house for Protestants' is merely a justification for the continuing operation of a unionist veto.

Last month, outraged that the North South Ministerial Council might be attending to outstanding issues despite the collapse of the Stormont institutions, David Trimble expressed his anger publicly.

Trimble accused the two government of "riding roughshod over the Good Friday Agreement" because their actions "would not be subject to the unionist veto". The two governments offered immediate reassurances.

Recently, this ideological manipulation has been accompanied by an apparent official desire to secure, for the foreseeable future at least, a statistical 'majority' for unionism.

Nationalist anger at being apparently cheated out of a clear break with the past was palpable, even amongst the most modest of nationalist commentators. But if nationalists were annoyed, unionists were cock a hoop

The Census

Last year, the British government had deemed the figures so politically explosive that the 2001 Census results had to be suppressed for over six months. But the very act of suppression was sufficient to set the alarm bells ringing.

For a body politic, artificially created and maintained on the basis of a sectarian head count, suppression of that count could mean only one thing. And it wasn't hard to guess.

Last month's publication of some of the census results confirmed what most of us suspected - a convergence between the north's unionist and nationalist populations that made the notion of the 'majority' community a nonsense.

As Brian Feeney of the Irish News pointed out, if the architects of unionist domination, Carson and Craig considered a 43% Catholic population within nine counties unviable "what does that make a six-county entity with a 44% Catholic population?"

The census statisticians put the proportion of six-county Catholics at 44% and Protestants at 53%, leaving a mere 3% to cover other ethnic groups, but nationalist commentators suspected some imaginative number crunching accompanied this result.

"Congratulations and a bottle of champagne go to Graham Gudgin for predicting to within one per cent the Catholic share of the north's population," wrote Feeney, suggesting a little more than coincidence.

Dr Gudgin, one of David Trimble's Special Advisors until last autumn, has never been known to get it right before, but as Feeney points out, "there's a first time for everything".

"No doubt, suspicions will be aroused that the books were cooked on the right side to offset another crisis," said fellow nationalist columnist James Kelly.

Given "the element of guesswork" employed by the statisticians who have admitted 'redistributing' "a huge army of dissenters, or coy folk, who refused to acknowledge any religious identity", Kelly argued, "all that can be said with accuracy is that the religious gap is narrowing".

But of one thing both Feeney and Kelly are sure. The gap has narrowed sufficiently to ensure an end to unionist domination.

"That 'white nigger' minority, treated as non persons during the earlier unionist dictatorships, that hopeless 33 per cent minority, has gone forever," said Kelly.

For Feeney, the census figures mean that unionists "can't have sole possession but must share the place on equal terms with nationalists" and "the census shows the change will be rapid".

Nationalist anger at being apparently cheated out of a clear break with the past was palpable, even amongst the most modest of nationalist commentators. But if nationalists were annoyed, unionists were cock a hoop.

"A United Ireland doesn't figure," trumpeted the Belfast Newsletter. "The Union is copper-fastened by census as results reveal the will of the people," headlined the editorial.

"Census figures have not produced the inevitable drift to a united Ireland scenario which nationalists and republican politicians were triumphally predicting in advance," said the editor.

"A comfortable majority of people in the Province - an overwhelming number of Protestants and a sizeable section of the Roman Catholic community - clearly favour the maintenance of the link with the United Kingdom and a unitary Irish state, where unionists would be a minority, is certainly not an option in the foreseeable future," said the Newsletter.

"An accurate summary of the official census figures reveals that at least 60 per cent can be categorised as unionist, through the combination of 53.1 per cent Protestant population (895,000), a percentage of the 43.8 per cent Roman Catholic population (738,000) and the 3.1 per cent of others (52,000)."

d just in case there were any doubters, "even nationalist politicians have recognised that a sizable percentage of the Roman Catholic populace is quite happy to live in a Northern Ireland government under the Crown".

Unionist Councillor Ian Crozier, writing in the North Belfast News, puts this percentage of 'happy' Roman Catholics at the even greater figure of 10%. Better still, Crozier suggests, a vote for the SDLP can't be considered anti-unionist.

"It is clear that while people may vote for the SDLP, it is all very well to cast your vote in a certain way when you know it isn't going to count," reassures Crozier.

But this is all clearly propaganda designed to reassure unionism and demoralise nationalists. A closer look at just how those percentages were achieved reveals the precarious nature of the statistical analysis offered in the census. The reinterpretation of that analysis by the media and political commentators has further exaggerated the relationship between Protestants and unionism.

According to the Newsletter, "in the unadjusted data of the census, those describing themselves as Protestant dropped to less than 46 per cent". But even this figure is open to interpretation.

In the census, 20.7% of those surveyed declared themselves to be Presbyterian, 15.3% Church of Ireland and 3.5% Methodist. These are the three main Protestant churches most closely associated with unionism and together they make up 39.5%. Catholics come in at an unequivocal 40.3%.

To this figure of 39.5% the statisticians added 6.1%, which they describe as "other Protestant and Christian-related denominations." This category actually makes no sense. Catholics are Christians and presumably a percentage of this 6.1% could just as easily be tagged onto the Catholic percentage.

This category will most probably also include groups like the Quakers, whose distinct history within the Six Counties suggests a more tenuous relationship with unionism than the harder line 39.5%.

But the Quakers, along with only god knows who, are included in a figure that later will be interpreted as pro-unionist. A further 0.3% was considered to have beliefs other than Christian and is politically discarded. The Forum for Ethnic Minorities has already challenged the 3% allocated to other ethnic groups as a significant underestimation.

So we have 39.5% plus the arbitrarily allocated 6.1%, which comes to a total of 45.6%, sadly not yet quite sufficient to secure that all important ideological more than 50% unionist majority.

The next stage is to reallocate the 13.9% who have refused to declare their religious affiliation. The census statisticians declare that around 3% genuinely have no religion (and therefore no discernable politics, a gross assumption), leaving roughly 11% to be allocated in that Protestant versus Catholic game.

The statisticians, using a variety of methods but predominantly through the postal address of the census respondent, reallocate this 11%.

No account is taken of the pressure on housing in Catholic areas and the increased likelihood that a percentage of those who chose not to declare their religion but are living in a unionist area will be Catholics keeping their heads down.

other 7.5% was allocated to the Protestant camp, bringing in a grand total of 53.1%, while the reallocation of 3.5% leaves Catholics with a 43.8% total.

In effect, the census statisticians have created a 'non-Catholic' category by grafting onto the 39.5% of declared Protestants most closely associated with unionism, a substantial 13.6% conglomerate whose religious status is questionable and whose political allegiances are not only far from clear but likely to be diverse. In the British and unionist media, this is further reinterpreted as a clear unionist majority.

To fully appreciate how precarious this presentation of the figures really is, it is only necessary to reallocate the same percentage of the nondeclared into a 'non-Protestant' category. It is nonsense of course, but no greater nonsense.

In this alternative myth, 40.3% of declared Catholics would be joined by 7.5% (a modest 4% above the official allocation) and suddenly the unionist majority not only dwindles to a few per cent but also recedes to just under the ideologically magical figure of 50%.

For the unionist majority, it is clearly a case of 'now you see it, now you don't'.

But if the census has been largely an exercise in muddying the water, the compilation of the new electoral register is currently shaping the clay.

Gerrymandering the Register

Last month, a Sinn Féin delegation met with the Electoral Commission in Belfast to discuss concerns at the large number of people across the Six Counties who have been left disenfranchised by their omission from the recently published electoral register.

According to the electoral office's own 'return of registration form' figures, over 130,000 people have failed to return forms. Sinn Féin estimates that the vast majority, around 90,000 people who have 'failed' to return forms are from the nationalist community.

The census figures suggest an even greater number of people entitled to vote have disappeared from the register. According to the census, as of June 2001, 1,260,029 people are eligible to vote. The Electoral Office returns only include 1,072,346. The census indicates a 200,000 shortfall.

Since June 2001 it is estimated that a further 50,000 first time voters are now eligible, bring the total to a possible 250,000 people 'missing' from the electoral register.

A conspiracy? Not necessarily.

Curiously convenient? You bet!