Unionists should not be complacent about census data, but there is no need for panic either

The census results for Northern Ireland were met with glee in many quarters.

For the first time in the history of the Province there are more people who identify as Catholic than as Protestant.

This is of course a significant moment, and indeed it poses a challenge for unionists, but this new population data does not have the import that nationalists might hope it does.)

There were more than a few references yesterday to Northern Ireland have been created to have an in-built Protestant majority. James Craig was again only partially quoted as boasting a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people (without the context of him saying that “... in the south they boasted of a Catholic state. They still boast of southern Ireland being a Catholic state ...”).

But this critique of NI is flawed as to its understanding of the very existence of the two-state solution, which was a sensible compromise in which the Irish counties most likely to support independence went one way and the counties most likely to support the British link went the other. They were of course mostly Catholic and Protestant respectively.

As recently as the start of the Troubles, Protestant church attendance in NI was far lower than Catholic, and so Protestants were faster into secularism. Hence why the number of Protestants who discard a religious label is growing faster than the Catholic population is rising.

Also, the figures show that the number of Catholics in NI is far higher, indeed 50% higher, than those who identify as Irish only. Meanwhile the number of people who identify as Northern Irish has soared.

It is hard to summarise census findings as complicated as these, but one thing is clear: while unionists should not be complacent about this data, there is no need to panic.

The king’s visit here last week suggested that there is still a huge instinctive sympathy for the status quo. And the small ‘Irish only’ percentage of the population shows that there is a large pool of people, 70+%, who might be persuaded that a Northern Ireland in the UK is an agreeable place to live.