ANYTHING which contributes to the fears of either community in Northern Ireland is an impediment to peace. Some of the factors that have this effect are difficult to eliminate: most notably paramilitary violence on either side.
But the fears of Northern unionists, which so notably contribute to their irreluctance to contemplate moving towards a new relationship with either Northern nationalists or our State, have been, and still are being, quite unnecessarily aggravated by the persistence of two demographic myths - one about Northern Protestants and the other about Protestants in this State.
Not enough has been done to demolish these myths - the first of which is being fostered by some triumphalist republican publicists and the second by some extreme unionist politicians, notably in the DUP.
The myth about Northern Protestants is that they are about to be outbred by Catholics. On several occasions I have heard Tim Pat Coogan expounding this thesis on radio, with an air of immense authority and in a tone that seemed to portray great satisfaction at this prospect.
However, nothing he has said has suggested any knowledge or grasp of the demographic developments of the past 15 years in Northern Ireland. Nor has there been any indication that he is aware of the contents, and discussion, of the seminal paper on "Demographic Structure in Northern Ireland and its Implications for Constitutional Preference", presented to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland on May 4th, 1994, by Edgar Jardine of the Statistics and Social Research Division of the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel.
Now, absolute precision about more recent Protestant/Catholic ratios in Northern Ireland has been rendered difficult by the growth in the numbers there, as in the Republic, who declare themselves to have no religion or who refuse to state a religious affiliation: recently published 1991 Census data shows that these two groups accounted in that year for just over 4 per cent of our population and for 11 per cent of that of Northern Ireland.
But statistical analysis of other characteristics of these two groups in Northern Ireland (e.g. fertility and Irish language speaking) has made it possible to arrive at a reasonably firm determination of the proportions of these two categories who respectively are of Catholic and Protestant background. From this analysis it emerges that fractionally over 42 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland in 1991 was what might he described as culturally Catholic as against a pre war Catholic figure of 33.5 per cent.
THIS rise in the Catholic share of Northern Ireland's population in the past 60 years has, of course, a function of the then higher Catholic birth rate. In the 1991 Census this produced a Catholic proportion of around 52 per cent for four to nine year olds. However, in the 0-1 age group the proportion of Catholics was down to 48.9 per cent. This trend reflected a sharp acceleration after 1986 of the decline in the Catholic birth rate. This has almost certainly continued since then and may well already have reduced the Catholic share of births to around 45 per cent.
If the differential between Protestant and Catholic birth rates in Northern Ireland has not already been eliminated, it is likely to disappear within a very few years. And with its disappearance the increase in the Catholic population will eventually tend to level off - at a figure well below 50 per cent.
The Catholic proportion will tend to rise again when those born in the 1970s and 1980s get married and in turn have children, but it will drift down again thereafter as that age cohort of parents is replaced by those born in the 1990s, a majority of whom are Protestant.
Excluding, of course, the possibility of mass conversions, in order for Catholics to outnumber Protestants it would be necessary for one or other of two developments to take place.
One would be through the re emergence of a differential involving a Catholic birth rate higher than that of Protestants: this seems unlikely to happen in any foreseeable future, especially in view of the fact that in the rest of Europe, Catholic countries now have notably lower birth rates than Protestant ones.
The other development that would be required to enable Catholics in Northern Ireland to outnumber Protestants would be a major differential between Protestant and Catholic emigration, sustained over a long period of years. But given that since 1990 the North, like the Republic, has been experiencing net immigration rather than emigration, with earlier emigrants returning home, there is clearly little sign of that happening.
To sum up then, there is no visible basis for the allegation that Catholics in Northern Ireland are likely at any foreseeable time to come to outnumber Protestants.
The suggestion that this is likely to happen is in fact based on an out of date, simplistic, and quite erroneous extrapolation of past trends, which ignores the highly significant demographic developments of the 15 years since 1981.
Those who propound this idea, whether motivated by nationalist triumphalism or by unionist paranoia, are doing no service either to truth or to the relaxation of tensions in Northern Ireland.
For Northern Protestants another indirect source of concern has been the halving of the Protestant population in our State during the period since independence.
They do not understand that this has been due to lower Protestant fertility until very recently, together with the impact on successive generations of Protestants of the Catholic Church's requirements for the upbringing of children of inter church marriages.
MANY unionists tend to assume instead that this development has reflected some kind of treatment of our Protestant population by the Catholic majority here that has led many Protestants to emigrate.
For some reason, no one seems hitherto to have examined emigration from our State in religious terms. Yet, using our Census data, it is possible to make a reasonably accurate assessment of the relative rates of Catholic and Protestant emigration at different periods.
This can be done by comparing the number of young children of each religion in past periods with the numbers of each religion surviving in Ireland some 30 odd years later.
A distorting factor has to be allowed for, viz., the fact that a proportion of each age cohort, which must be broadly similar for each religion, dies before reaching their 30s or early 40s. Although nowadays small, this figure ran as high as 15 per cent in the early days of the State, representing a rate of attrition half as great as emigration itself.
The table below sets out the pattern of emigration by Catholics, on the one hand, and members of the Church of Ireland, Presbyterians and Methodists, on the other.
It shows that a significantly higher level of emigration by Protestant than by Catholic young people in the pre war period has since 1945 been transformed into a Protestant emigration rate much lower than that of Catholics.
It may be recalled that in this column of November 8th last year, I reported that the latest (1991) census data for religion shows that 40 per cent of Protestants here are engaged in higher income employments, (viz. administration, management, the major professions, or ownership of large farms) as against 20 per cent of Catholics.
It might be helpful if these facts were better known to unionists in Northern Ireland.