In the lower class public jobs, such as manual work, Catholics were represented more, or more accurately under represented less. For example, it is confirmed by the census of 1971, that Catholics are under represented by less that 1% in education (lower class public service), yet in the higher class government and administration, they are under represented by 6.7%. This shows that even though they were discriminated against less as the level decreased, there was still a fair amount of discrimination among all levels of the public sectors throughout the 1960s, both in terms of representation and in terms of wage.
There was even more discrimination to a much greater extent in the private sector, as it employed roughly 75% of all workers in Northern Ireland. The main culprits for discrimination in the private sector were actually the private engineering firms, such as Harland and Wolff shipyard and Mackies textile machinery work, both of which employed very few Catholics. For example, in 1982, A Fair Employment Agency report asserted that there were no Catholic engineers working for Harland and Wolff and that only 10% of Mackies’ employees were Catholics. This shows that even 20 years on, there was still a very large amount of discrimination happening in these private engineering firms. In addition, Paddy Devlin described a job at Mackies in his book “where his fellow workers threw nuts and bolts as well as abuse at him” just because he was Catholic. Although the book was set in the 1930s, it depicts the brutality of the company, showing how bigoted and discriminative it was then, and with no reason to change, how it still may have been in the 1960s. Additionally, R.G. Cooper, an employee in the engineering industry in the 1960s, declared that Catholic job applicants were “weeded out at an early stage” illustrating how much discrimination there was among these engineering companies. Overall, this shows that there was a large amount of discrimination by unionists towards Catholics in the private sector (on its own and in comparison to the public sector) in terms of hiring and retaining workers. This hence illustrates that they wanted Catholics to have a lesser opportunity in the working world.
Secondly, it is necessary to understand the discrimination which occurred in terms of housing and to what extent it happened.
Protestants were frequently given priority over Catholics to houses. This was often a clear demonstration of discrimination as it was often given to Protestants who were less deserving. For example, in June 1968, Nationalist MP Austin Currie protested about a 19 year old girl (Emily Beattie) being allocated a council house over a Catholic family who needed it more. She had been given priority because she was the secretary of a Unionist MP. After Currie staged the sit in, he was removed from the house by a police officer who happened to be Beattie’s brother. This shows how there was sectarian bias towards this Protestant girl, and clearly some discrimination towards the Catholic family, as the unionists gave favour to their own religion. As Lord Cameron said, “By no stretch of the imagination could Miss Beattie be regarded as a priority tenant” Once again showing that this was a definite case of discrimination.
In addition to this issue with ‘priorities’, Catholics were also limited in their rights to where they could live. There have been many cases where they have been denied housing by the government in certain districts in order to protect the gerrymandered boundaries, and keep the unionist government in firm control. For example, Bowyer Bill wrote, “Without a house the Catholics would go away. With a house, the Catholics would stay and put the gerrymandered districts to threat. So there were few houses for Catholics”. This clarifies how the unionist Stormont government refused Catholics housing because they didn’t want them in certain areas, taking away their freedom in order to keep gerrymandered boundaries to stay in power. This means that there was a lot of discrimination as houses that were built in Protestant districts nearly all went to Protestants.
As well as being limited by the government, Catholics were also forced to move from Protestant areas by the people who lived there, sometimes violently. For example, B MacLaverty wrote in his novel “His father and he were the only Catholic family left in the whole estate. Fear had driven others out but his father would not move” This shows the extent of the discrimination; even local Protestants would try to remove a Catholic from a unionist district, illustrating how much bigotry and discrimination there was for the Catholics. Overall, this depicts how Protestants were given priority to houses and how Catholics were given no freedom to live where they wanted, both showing a significant amount of bigotry and discrimination.
In the end, it is very clear that Catholics were discriminated against in a variety of different ways - in public employment, although even more so in the private sector by engineering firms. Protestants were also preferred to Catholics in terms of housing priority; however, the main discrimination in housing came from the lack of freedom in living within gerrymandered unionist districts. Overall, it is evident that that discrimination occurred to a large extent against Catholics.
