Trimble adviser queries claims Catholics faced discrimination

A key adviser to the North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, has challenged nationalist arguments that unionist governments engaged in widespread discrimination against Catholics in the allocation of jobs and housing.

Dr Graham Gudgin argues in a new book that the claims of such discrimination by civil rights activists in the 1960s, and since then, were exaggerated and did not take account of nationalist discrimination against Protestants.

Dr Gudgin said it was almost axiomatic among nationalists in Ireland that unionist discrimination helped spark this period of conflict. He said "the violence of the last 30 years is widely interpreted as having at least some justification in the behaviour of the unionist people and government".

Commentators, historians, and journalists regularly put the discrimination argument. The "most influential" use of it came in the report of the New Ireland Forum of 1983 stating that Northern Catholics were "deprived of the means of social and economic development".

Dr Gudgin, in his article in a new book, The Northern Ireland Question - Nationalism, Unionism and Partition set out to puncture this analysis. The book is edited by Mr Brian Barton, a research fellow at the politics department of Queen's University, Belfast and Dr Patrick J. Roche, an Assembly member and member of the Northern Ireland Unionist Party.

Dr Gudgin, writing in a personal capacity, says that in 1971, the penultimate year of the unionist Stormont administration, "Catholics comprised 26.1 per cent of households but occupied 30.7 per cent of local authority households".

"We might ask how it can be that it is widely believed that the unionist authorities built few houses for Catholics when in fact the statistics show that they provided proportionately more for Catholics than for Protestants," he wrote.

He said the likely reason for the advantage was the larger family size of Catholics. Information from the 1971 census also showed that Catholics were worse off than Protestants in terms of house amenities - 36 per cent of Catholics lacked basic amenities, whereas the figures for Church of Ireland members and Presbyterians respectively were 31 per cent and 27 per cent.

Statistics from the 1960s showed that local unionist councils built few houses for Catholics in Dungannon, Omagh and Armagh. "A number of small local authorities in Fermanagh and Tyrone built very few houses for Catholics either within their boundaries or in areas where doing so would upset the electoral basis," added Dr Gudgin.

On employment, he said no evidence had been produced to support some nationalist assertions that unionist administrations had a deliberate policy of job discrimination in order to maintain the population balance in favour of Protestants.

While only 7.4 per cent of Catholics held senior civil servant positions at Stormont, autobiographical accounts from at least four high-ranking officials, two of them Catholics, "paint a convincing picture of a fair and efficient civil service", he wrote.

Dr Gudgin also said there were too few Catholic applicants for senior posts. He said in local authorities the under-representation of Catholics in the workforce was "slight".

He said there were local imbalances against Catholics in "gerrymandered areas of Fermanagh, Dungannon, Omagh and Armagh" but that equally in Newry urban district council "only three out of 161 employees were Protestant".

In the private sector there were allegations of discrimination against Catholics in companies such as Harland and Wolff, Shorts and Mackies but again, Dr Gudgin contends, "Protestant workers had similar experiences in Catholic-dominated firms".