Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Census 2021: implications for Northern Ireland, HC 835
Wednesday 16 November 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 16 November 2022.
Members present: Simon Hoare (Chair); Stephen Farry; Sir Robert Goodwill; Claire Hanna; Carla Lockhart; Ian Paisley; Mr Robin Walker.
Questions 51 - 66
Witnesses
II: Dr Laurence Cooley, Lecturer in Comparative Politics, School of Government, University of Birmingham; and Dr Kevin McNicholl, Open Learning Tutor, Queen’s University Belfast.
Witnesses: Dr Laurence Cooley and Dr Kevin McNicholl.
Q51 Chair: We now need to turn to our second session. We are joined by Dr Kevin McNicholl, who is going to be joining us online. Good morning, Dr McNicholl. We are joined in real time by Dr Laurence Cooley. Thank you both very much indeed for joining us.
Let us start session two in the way that we ended session one, which is the 45.7% Catholic, the 43.48% Protestant and the growth in “other”. What does that mean for future policy evolution and application and that in-baked need to always balance the orange and the green, or the green and the orange, dependent upon which end of the telescope you care to look at it from?
Dr Cooley: That is a very significant finding of the census, particularly if we consider that Northern Ireland exists as a polity with six counties rather than nine, because of the 1911 census. Data from that census was used to, essentially, draw the boundaries of Northern Ireland, so that it had this inbuilt two-to-one Protestant to Catholic majority, which was assumed to be supportive of the union with Great Britain.
The fact that we now have a community of a Catholic background that has overtaken the Protestant and other Christian community background is hugely symbolically significant. In terms of the practical implications, given the relationship between identity and voting behaviour and constitutional preferences, lots will be read into that.
I would just caveat that a little by saying that what we have not seen in this census is a replacement of a Protestant majority with a Catholic majority. The Protestant majority had already disappeared before this census, and we now have, as was discussed in the previous session, a society of three minorities, of which the Catholic-background community is the largest.
That will have implications for election results, but we are already seeing that. If we think back to the most recent Assembly elections, we perhaps see some of the outplaying of those demographic changes there.
Dr McNicholl: I would very much echo what we just heard. Certainly, it is symbolically significant, at the very least, that there are more Catholics than Protestants on the census results. In terms of policy, the obvious one is that there are going to be increased calls for a border poll. As many commentators have noted, that is not necessarily an indicator that such a border poll would pass. There could be quite a way.
That relates to a big part of what I would like to say. I would like to take this apart as we go through the session. This “other” group who would swing any such border poll are a very diverse group, and even considering them as a third group of people in the country, or a third minority, over-eggs the idea that this is a homogenous group in the same way as Irish or British. There is a bit of a common-sense idea that, since the end of the conflict, there is this growing middle ground that is politically centrist, of no religion and does not call themselves nationalist or unionist. Those people exist, but there is a lot more diversity within the Northern Irish group or within the no-religion group than might be considered.
One of the most important takeaways from the census that I have not heard commented on as much is that part of the reason why someone would indicate that they are Protestant is not the same reason as why somebody would indicate that they are Catholic. It seems that, whenever Catholics stop their religious observance, they would still call themselves Catholic, because it is more of a cultural thing with political significance. For Protestants, that is not necessarily the case to the same extent. That is why you find that, when you ask the British alone, they still have quite a substantial number more than Irish, for example.
Q52 Chair: Certainly, one is always familiar with people describing themselves as a lapsed Catholic, but very rarely as a lapsed Protestant or anything else. Can I just challenge you? Maybe “challenge” is too confrontational; let me just drill into your assertion of this percentage finding inexorably leading to further agitation for a border poll. Speaking in a personal capacity, I am a Roman Catholic, but I would also describe myself as a supporter of the unity of the United Kingdom. Is there a danger of presuming that all who would identify as being Catholic are in favour not just of a border poll but of Irish reunification?
Dr McNicholl: Certainly not, no. I certainly would not want to give the idea that there is any kind of uniformity. In fact, somewhere around 70% of Catholics consider themselves nationalist and, of the people who call themselves nationalist, a lot do not even want a united Ireland in the short term or in the long term.
Chair: That was my understanding and belief. I just wanted the opportunity for you to put that on the record, and I am grateful.
Q53 Sir Robert Goodwill: Dr Cooley, you have already referred to these three communities in Northern Ireland: the Catholics, the Protestants and the “none of the above”. The Northern Irish constitutional settlement pretty much talks about the two communities. We heard in the first session how, although perhaps because the population is ageing this process is being slowed, we still have low birth rates, immigration and what-have-you. In the long term, what will this mean for Northern Ireland’s future and the current constitutional arrangements?
Dr Cooley: In terms of the constitutional arrangements around power sharing, for example, which you could argue is based on this two-communities model, the institutions established by the Belfast/Good Friday agreement are, in some ways, more flexible than some power-sharing systems that exist elsewhere, because they allocate positions in the Executive based on electoral outcomes.
Parties that designate as “other” can potentially hold positions in the Executive—indeed, right up to the First Minister position. Another case that I have conducted research on is Bosnia, where there is a tripartite presidency, which has to be made up of one Bosniak, one Serb and one Croat, to the exclusion of others.
There is scope for accommodating the changes that may flow from some of these demographic changes. Some people have suggested that there might be a need to look at those institutions. Some of Mr Farry’s Alliance colleagues, for example, have asked what this growth in “other” means for cross-community voting, for example, which prioritises those who identify as nationalist or unionist, and whether that needs to be thought about.
I would echo Dr McNicholl’s point—I perhaps have done this myself in the past as well—that there is a danger of assuming that people who are opting out of communal categorisation do not see themselves as either nationalists or unionists. There will be people who describe themselves as neither Protestant nor Catholic and might describe themselves as Northern Irish rather than Irish or British, but nonetheless will still have a relatively strong constitutional preference. There is a real complexity in that “other” group and what that might mean politically.
Dr McNicholl: In terms of constitutional change, there is a persistent, robust preference among about a third of people who call themselves Northern Irish, and there are a lot of people who at least describe themselves as neither unionist nor nationalist. Whether they vote that way in the ballot box is a different matter.
In terms of the power-sharing arrangements, there is this system of a veto, like in many power-sharing systems, and that veto was not enjoyed by the “neither” category, but I am not sure that there would be an awful lot of call for that to be expanded, but rather more of a call for that to be ended altogether, if it is still needed.
The centre ground is interesting to me, because there is really no institutional facilitation of it. There is no Northern Irish flag or national anthem, or any institutions that are really trying to promote Northern Irishness. It still maintains itself and is still there, for some reason, but whether this needs encouragement in the Assembly is an open question as to whether you prefer that. It does not need that kind of facilitation to exist.
Q54 Sir Robert Goodwill: That leads me neatly into the next question regarding the almost 20% of people who now describe themselves as Northern Irish, not British only or Irish only. What sort of people are we talking about? Presumably we are not talking about people who vote DUP. They are strongly British, I would have thought, because the whole point of being unionist is that you consider that you are part of the United Kingdom.
Chair: Other unionist parties are available.
Sir Robert Goodwill: Other unionist parties are available, of course, and the Conservative Party also fields candidates in Northern Ireland, but it does not have a great deal of success. Who are these people who describe themselves like this? Are they the “none of the above” who we have just talked about? Who are these people?
Dr McNicholl: They are an extremely diverse group of people with a very diverse set of reasons. You are going to have those people who want to opt out of a sectarian binary and do not want to call themselves Irish or British. There are going to be people who call themselves Northern Irish because a stranger has come into their house with a clipboard and is asking them strange questions about their national identity. Northern Irish can be a safe option. It does not betray what you really believe. In fact, one of the main appeals of Northern Irish identification is that it is so ambiguous that people do not really know what you mean whenever you say that. It could mean anything.
In terms of political beliefs, there could be the full spectrum of political beliefs contained within it. You could have those people who have strong centrist beliefs saying, “I am neither unionist nor nationalist”. In some of my most interesting data collection whenever I talk to young people, some say that they are strongly nationalist. They do not believe that Northern Ireland should exist. In fact, they would very rarely say the words “Northern Ireland” discursively to legitimise the state. It is not because they feel Northern Irish. It is because they are treated as Northern Irish. They would say, “To an extent, I am Northern Irish. People in the south just do not treat us like we are just as Irish. They think that we are less Irish than they are.” How other people are treating you, rather than how you feel, is reflected in an acknowledgement of Northern Irishness.
Within the DUP, I collected some data that took anonymised transcripts of answers to questions of MLAs in the Assembly. I do not know who was responding or which party they were from. A lot of them did express a Northern Irish identification. One of the most interesting things about the census is that it was able to break it down into whether you think you are British Irish or Northern Irish only, or if it mixes well with something else. Northern Irishness seems to mix well with different national identities. It can be considered either a rejection of different national identities or a consideration of, “I feel a mixture of one and the other.”
There are so many reasons why. For example, an interesting one is a geographical reason. Let us say you live half a mile away from the border. It is not really your national identity in terms of a patriotism for this area. It is, “I just live that side of the road. I live up there. I am Northern Irish.” You can call yourself Northern Irish because you believe in the Northern Irish state, or you can call yourself northern Irish with a small “n”—“I am Irish, but I am just from the north.” This diversity is very interesting and there are all sorts of reasons, so treating these as a third homogenous group should be done with extreme caution.
Q55 Sir Robert Goodwill: We should not read too much into that way people describe themselves, for a variety of reasons. I do not know if Dr Cooley has any further comments on that point.
Dr Cooley: Dr McNicholl was being quite modest. He has done significant amounts of research on people who describe themselves as Northern Irish. Having read some of it, I would just reinforce that point that it seems that there is really a spectrum of political belief within that Northern Irish identity. Those people might look quite different from one another and vote in very different ways, and may have different views on the constitution.
Q56 Sir Robert Goodwill: It may not be to the exclusion of the other description. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English and I am British, but I do not see those as being at all contradictory.
Dr Cooley: There is an interesting thing about the national identity question, which was introduced only in 2011 so is still relatively new. It has been included in only two censuses, and not, by the way, included for any reasons really relating to making judgments about political preferences. The origins of the question lie more in England and Wales than in Northern Ireland. It allows multiple responses, which the religion and the religious background questions do not. It may help us get at some of that complexity, which is a binary divide of the religion question, which has always been there on the census but has not enabled us to do in the past.
Sir Robert Goodwill: Thank you. I am much better informed now.
Q57 Chair: Good. We have served a purpose this morning, Robert. I am tempted to say that our life work is done and we could die happy, but let us move on.
On those who have come to Northern Ireland—we know that quite a large number of people came from Syria, as well as a recently traditionally large cohort of people who are originally from Poland and who have been working in Northern Ireland—is there anything interesting there about how they identify? If they are born in Poland, do they say, “I was Polish but I now identify as being Northern Irish, or Irish from the north of Ireland”? Is there anything interesting coming through on that? What about for those from Syria as well?
Dr McNicholl: The indications that I have seen are that it would be harder for someone to move to Northern Ireland and consider themselves Northern Irish than it would be if they were to move to England and call themselves British. It is acknowledged here that, in other, more stable countries with longer histories and that are not so politically fraught, national identity is taken for granted. If I move to France, I might take it for granted that I have to be accepted, unless I am being actively discriminated against, into this wider category.
Here, national identity is a choice. It is something that you sit down and think about, and it requires knowledge of the politics of the area to make a decision as to what you are. Yes, there will be plenty of people who will accept whatever you choose to be, but, in the data that I have collected, perhaps unfortunately, some people say you cannot really be Northern Irish until you have been here for a while and understand the politics, and have made that decision actively and well interpreted it.
What was interesting in the census was a question about ethnicity. One category is “white”, and the others are the names of countries, so it conflates national identity with ethnic identity. In a lot of cases, some people might stick with their national identity of the place where they came from. Those kinds of decisions would have to be made by someone, and that is going to have an impact on discrimination and prejudice.
Q58 Chair: Has any of your research thrown up, or do you have a hunch, that, given, as you have referenced, the fraught nature of the politics of Northern Ireland, people just find it a safer bet to say, “I am Polish. I could have been living in Belfast for 25 years, but I am still Polish,” because that is almost your get-out-of-jail free card?
Dr McNicholl: Yes, and that would be one of the appeals of Northern Irishness as opposed to Irish or British. You might not have been here very long to realise that it is a divided society. You may want to ensure that you are not considered a part of that or that you are not taking a side. It is also the case that, quite often—this is anecdotal but I have heard it in a number of cases—if someone moves to a particular area that is dominated by one tradition, they will quite actively try to feel included by taking on that either Irish or British identity, depending on where they are, in order to try to be considered included as part of the social group. Quite often, their politics can be quite robust for that reason.
Q59 Claire Hanna: Thank you to both our witnesses. This is all very interesting. You mentioned it being anecdotal and personalised; for Robert’s benefit, you would enjoy John Hewitt, who said, “I am an Ulsterman, British, Irish and European”, and anyone who omits one of these steps “is falsifying the situation”, because people are constructing it.
Dr McNicholl, your research focusing on Northern Irish identity in one of your studies suggests that the small numbers of those ascribing to identity combinations of Irish Northern Irish and British Northern Irish indicates a rejection of Irish and British identities, rather than a synthesis of them. Could you explain that a wee bit further? I declare an interest as somebody who ticked one of those boxes and does not match that, but I am interested in it as a concept.
Dr McNicholl: In the early literature of the Northern Irish identity, it quite often comes from a sociopsychological perspective of social identity theory. As part of that, what has been found is that, in many interventions in this region, they try to get good-quality contact and integrate education between people of different traditions. What they have found is that, under certain conditions, prejudice reduces. One of the reasons for this is because your sub-identity becomes included in a wider identity—a super-ordinate, inclusive, common-end group. That is one reason why prejudicial attitudes will be one or the other. For a lot of people who call themselves Northern Irish, it is correlated with integrated education for that reason. You feel like this is one category that includes all categories.
However, there is a group of people—it is not common—who are not just frustrated by the sectarian binary but quite militantly consider Irishness and Britishness as a problem and Northern Irishness as a solution to this problem. They think we should be actively promoting it. You do not really think about the militant centre ground, but I have heard some interesting comments to that extent.
Q60 Claire Hanna: That is interesting. I probably should have directed this to our previous panel. I remember filling in the census for my own children. I remember one of the questions asking how she identifies. I thought, “She is two, so she does not have very strong feelings about her national identity.” Have you done an analysis of those identities being ascribed by parents on to their children? I am not sure whether you have access to that level of the data. What does that mean in terms of age cohorts?
Dr McNicholl: The closest I could come to that is that there are interesting differences between what the census says and what things like the Northern Ireland life and times survey says, which is only for people who are 18-plus. A certain amount of households are filling it in in front of each other and things like that. There is going to be that kind of pressure. The census is very good at measuring some things, but it is not great at measuring other things, especially things that are not demographic. What is the national identity of my two infant children? What does that even mean? Do they have a national identity? I do not think “none” was an option on the census. It is a difficult question.
There are differences. A couple of years ago the Northern Ireland life and times survey showed that Northern Irish was more popular than either Irish or British, which is interesting. It is curious. Basically, what I am trying to say is that how you collect the data is going to make a big swing. Whether it is paper, whether it is online and who is answering the question for whom will make a big difference.
Dr Cooley: I think I am correct in saying that at the moment we do not have any of the identity data broken down by age, for example. That data will be coming in the spring from NISRA.
Dr Shuttleworth mentioned this longitudinal study. If it is possible, it would be interesting to track whether, if people are categorised as something in their childhood by their parents, they then continue to hold that identity or whether a proportion of them drop out into the “none” or “other” categories.
If we go back to the 1980s and 1990s, there was this expectation that there would eventually be the emergence of a Catholic overall majority. It is possible to say that is called into question now because the growth in the Catholic-background population between the 2011 to 2021 censuses was only 0.6%. It is still some way off 50%. That is clearly because of this growing group of people who might be in some sense from a Catholic background but who do not describe themselves as that when they get to fill out their census form. Whether their parents would might be a different thing, of course. It could potentially change over a lifetime, yes.
Q61 Mr Walker: Dr Cooley has partly answered my question about whether there is any breakdown of statistics on an age basis for the identification in terms of being Northern Irish, but we are waiting for that data, from what you are saying.
Dr Cooley: Yes. It is called the multivariate data release. If you go on to the NISRA website, it currently says it will be released in spring. It tells you all of the tables that will be available. It is things like religion and religious background by age and the cross-tabulation of religious background and national identity, which will be interesting for some of these questions. For example, who are the Northern Irish? How do they identify in terms of religion?
Q62 Mr Walker: I was quite struck by the comment that was made about different geographical locations. Perhaps people around the borders identify automatically more as Northern Irish on the basis that that is where they happen to be, and therefore it is more of a defining factor. That is interesting.
Going back to some of the earlier questioning, I wanted to touch on your role in comparative politics and look at this as well. With the change in identities and the breakdown, perhaps, of a more traditional two-identity approach, is that something that could play a factor in the emergence of perhaps a more normal politics within power sharing where there is an opposition as well as parties sharing power in Government?
In your knowledge of the other systems that rely on power sharing, are there good examples of having a functional opposition in a power-sharing scenario?
Dr Cooley: That is a good question. Most of the other cases I have looked at where there is some sort of relationship between the census and power sharing do not have particularly good examples that we would really like to learn from.
If we look at the Lebanese case, for example, political representation is very much tied tightly to population shares from the last census that was conducted in Lebanon, which was in 1932. Everyone recognises that the demography has changed significantly since then. In particular, the Christian population has shrunk. It would be a Pandora’s box to open that up and have another census. Some significant groups would not agree to holding a census to find out the new population shares and rebalance the power-sharing system because that would clearly lead to some groups losing out significantly in terms of their quotas.
Like I have said, the way the Northern Ireland Assembly works, to use the language of the comparative politics literature, is a more liberal rather than corporate form of power sharing, or consociationalism, to use the technical term. It is a bit better placed to deal with those kinds of things.
We also see in some other cases campaigns around the census. The census starts to look a bit like an election. That was definitely the case in Bosnia in 2013. There was a big push there to try to encourage people to identify as “other” in relation to their ethnicity question as a way of rejecting ethnic identification. I talked to people who were involved in that campaign. Part of the reason they wanted to do that was as an outright rejection of their form of power sharing and this system where only Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs are represented in the presidency. Ultimately, that was not a particularly successful campaign, but we do see some interesting things going on there, which we do not see in the context of Northern Ireland.
Q63 Mr Walker: If we go back far enough in Northern Irish history, there were boycotts of censuses in the past, were there not? That has been an issue in the past. How have we depoliticised the census to the extent we have?
Dr Cooley: For those who might not be familiar, the 1971 census and particularly the 1981 census were the subject of protests and boycotts. I am writing a paper on that that draws on some of the archive material from PRONI and newspapers. In 1981 it was against the context of a hunger strike.
Stephen Farry: A census worker was murdered.
Dr Cooley: Yes, a census worker was murdered in Derry as well. How have we got from that? Part of it is the reduction in the level of violence and the emergence of political arrangements to deal with the conflict. One of the things that started to change attitudes towards the census among nationalists and republicans was a growing sense that census data mattered for equality monitoring purposes, which you have heard a little bit about in the previous session. Some senior republican figures started to encourage Catholics to complete the census and specify their religion because it was necessary for equalities monitoring. The addition of the Irish language question in the 1991 census provided a bit of an extra incentive, some have argued, to respond to the census.
Dr McNicholl: I would simply add that you are not ever going to depoliticise the census. Whenever they tick a box, people know it is not just based on self-reflection. They know they are doing something that will have an impact. That is not going to disappear.
To jump back slightly to comparative politics, I just want to highlight a very interesting parallel between here and Rwanda. Following the genocide—I believe it is still a power-sharing Government—any discussion of Hutu or Tutsi is considered “genocide ideology”. They very much promoted this Rwandan national identity. The translation of it is “from Rwanda”. That is a really serious imposition of the centre ground identity or inclusive identity to the extent that it can really marginalise people. People do not necessarily like that very much. The Northern Irish identity plays a similar role. It has not had that kind of active promotion by the state, but it still seems to exist. There is an interesting parallel there.
Q64 Chair: I just want to go back to the perpetual green-orange balance, thinking of the figures of 45.7% and 43.8% and the deeper establishment of the other and the new. Is there any implication there for the provision of education that policy makers should be thinking about?
Dr Cooley: Clearly, given that the majority of children in Northern Ireland go to schools that are either Catholic or Protestant, the growth in opting out of those identities is likely to be significant, from that point of view. I wonder whether this will be something that will be taken up by the integrated education movement.
Chair: You can only opt out if there is viable alternative provision both qualitatively and quantitatively, can you not?
Ian Paisley: There are no Protestant schools in Northern Ireland.
Dr Cooley: Yes, I mean state schools, many of which would have large Protestant-majority populations. I meant opting out in relation to the answering of questions on the census rather than the education system, so the opting out of specifying a religion on the census. Whether that provides some evidence that will be used by the integrated education movement is something that will be interesting to follow, but I do not know. That would be speculation on my part.
Q65 Carla Lockhart: Some have argued that the census, in reporting on historically divided societies, can also inadvertently help to reproduce those divisions. Would you agree with that? If so, why? Or why not?
Dr Cooley: It is a complicated issue. There is some research that suggests that censuses can be implicated even in the emergence of identities in the first place. People often, for example, point to the case of the United States census and the role that played in the emergence of a Hispanic identity, this pan-ethnic identity that came about partly through the census. We do not see anything like that, clearly, in the Northern Ireland case. The communal identities are very well established. The census is not perpetuating division in any sense like that.
For example, there are some Alliance politicians who have an objection to the people who have specified that they do not have a religion being asked this follow-up question on community background. As I understand it, if people do not answer the community background question, NISRA engages in a process of what is called imputation. Based on people’s other answers to the census questionnaire, an answer will be inputted for them. This has been described as pigeon-holing people into communal identities. There is some debate about that.
In talking to people who have engaged in the census, I have encountered some opposition to that almost compulsory communal categorisation, but it is still a relatively marginal voice among people who are interested in the census.
Dr McNicholl: Just to add to that, I would argue that the census promotes a logic of that kind of sectarian division. To an extent, the power-sharing Government is a reflection of that. Power sharing is politically agnostic. It tries to acknowledge a liberal idea of different political ideologies having some sort of equivalence or parity of esteem. What it is trying to do is create a mechanism where the tensions between different groups of people, as opposed to different political ideologies, are resolved and there is competition in the different institutions of the state between different groups of people.
The census might reflect an idea that politics in this region is about competing groups of people. One interesting thing is that a lot of republicans that I spoke to argued that even including the Northern Irish identity in the census was a politically motivated act; it was almost like a nefarious plot to try to normalise the state of Northern Ireland. They thought this was an attempt to use a more watered-down version, instead of nationalists calling themselves Irish, to legitimise the Northern Irish state.
Q66 Chair: I have two final questions. Is there anything that you wish we had asked you and we have not? Is there anything that you consider important to this census process that we have not asked you about and that you want to place on the record? If the answer is no to both, that is absolutely fine.
Dr Cooley: I was hinting at this when I suggested that the national identity question was only added in 2011. Decisions about the design of the census and what questions get added are often taken for quite mundane bureaucratic reasons. The addition of the national identity question was partly inspired by dissatisfaction with the ethnicity question in England and Wales and the difficulties of capturing data on citizenship for people who did not have passports, which the UK was required to provide to Eurostat as an EU member at the time.
Those bureaucratic decisions end up to leading to the addition of a question that then gets asked in Northern Ireland as well, which has potentially significant political implications. We are sitting here and talking about it. Of course the religion question has always been there, but even that has changed, in the sense that the religious background question was added as a supplementary in 2001. I would just make the point that these often seemingly arcane bureaucratic debates about how questions are phrased and whether they are asked in the first place can have unintended consequences for political discourse.
Dr McNicholl: Whenever the 2011 census came out, the main headline that people were taking away was that this was the rise of the Northern Irish—this was the rise of this centre ground of people. Whenever the last census came out, the main headline figure was that there were more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland.
The significance of both those things can be slightly exaggerated, or has been exaggerated somewhat, but both instances prompt the idea that there are a lot of people here who are at the very least open to asking themselves questions about constitutional futures who might not have been previously. Those sorts of things should be acknowledged and prepared for.
Chair: Gentlemen, thank you both very much indeed for your time and input this morning. It has been invaluable and incredibly useful. We are grateful.