THE chairman of the North's Fair Employment Commission, Mr Bob Cooper, has strongly denied allegations that Catholics are gaining jobs in Northern Ireland at the expense of Protestants.
Mr Cooper was speaking yesterday at the publication of the EEC's seventh annual monitoring report which profiles the workforce of employers registered with the commission in 1996.
He said: "Crucially, there is no evidence whatsoever for the assertion that there has been or is widespread discrimination in favour of Catholics by employers."
The EEC chief was responding to remarks by the director of the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, Dr Graham Gudgin, who earlier this week claimed that over the last 25 years all of the additional jobs created in Northern Ireland have gone to the Catholic community.
"Catholic employment has risen in the public sector while Protestant employment has fallen, but it is in the private sector that the gap between Catholic increase and Protestant decline has become dramatic," said Dr Gudgin.
However, these remarks have infuriated Mr Cooper, who replied: "The suggestion that it is happening is to insult and malign the thousands of employers ink Northern Ireland who not only comply with the legislation but" who work within the spirit of it.
"In its contribution to the debate on fair employment, the Northern Ireland Economic, Research Centre has said that it, was such that all additional jobs over the past 25 years had gone to the Catholic community to the detriment of the Protestant community. This is also dangerously wrong," said Mr Cooper.
Mr Cooper said that since 1990 Catholics' share of the monitored workforce has increased by 3.2 percent age points. According to 1996 figures it stands at 38.1 per cent, although Catholics make up over 40 per cent of those available for work. Among Catholic males, their share has increased by 3.3 per cent since 1990 and now stands at 35.3 per cent.
Mr Cooper stressed that the greatest change was in the managers and administrators group which has risen from 30.5 per cent in 1990 to 35.7 per cent in 1996.
"Catholics in professional occupations are now close to their share of the working population."
The FEC chief revealed that among 100 of the largest private sector employers there is a lower proportion (37.9 per cent) of Catholics than for the private sector as a whole (38.3 per cent). "But these companies show a very significant increase in their Catholic share of 5.4 percentage points compared to 3.7 percentage points for all private sector companies.