Job salaries and employment were also segregated. Protestants were better paid, with higher positions in jobs and in predominantly Protestant areas while the Catholics were stuck with menial jobs and scanty wages. This meant the Catholics couldn’t improve their standard of living. “The big employers were privately run companies and although Catholics regularly anti-Catholic prejudice among foremen or personnel managers, it is a hard thing to prove. All that can be recorded is that of 10,000 workers in Belfast shipyard – the biggest single source of employment in the city – just 400 are Catholics.” The employers were prejudiced and only hired a few Catholics and even then they were given only just enough to live on.
Housing and living standards for the Catholics were also segregated and prejudiced. In Northern Ireland there were more Protestant homes than Catholic homes. This was due to the gerrymandering (fixed elections) that the Protestants had done and the Catholics were stuck with poor run down homes with either no heating, or lights and outside lavatories. The Catholics tended to have big families so there was usually Catholic houses that were overcrowded. Terence O’Neill commented on this issue. “Its frightfully hard to explain to the Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants, because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets… They will refuse to have 18 children, but if they are jobless and live in the most ghastly hovel, they will rear 18 children on National Assistance…” (Taken from Terence O’Neill, Unionist Prime Minister.) The rent the Catholics had to pay was considerably more than what Protestants had to pay and the Protestants were given better houses too. This was a real disadvantaged because they didn’t have very good jobs so they could not afford to pay for better houses and they also spent most of their money on their current rent. Voting rights also affected the Catholics living standards as more Protestant homes meant that the government got more votes because people who owned houses were allowed to vote so if Catholics owned houses, they would not vote in a Protestant government.
Politics was one of the areas that Catholics had no power over. Northern Ireland was part of the UK so the real power and government was in London and at Westminster. At Westminster, even though all the MP’s gathered, the Catholic MP’s did not. They boycotted the elections (Refused to take part in the elections) and would not swear loyalty to the Queen, allowing the Protestants to take the position and dominate as the Northern Ireland parliament. This boycott did not improve the current situation, as it did not change the way the Protestants treated the Catholics.
In the law and order Catholics were segregated also. In Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constibulary were considered the safest law – enforcing group but it was mostly Protestant and most of them were part of the Orange Order, which disliked Catholics intensely. B - specials were also another law enforcing group but who specialised in enforcing the law in any way necessary and were made up of hard – line loyalists. But many of the members were considered anti - Catholic and usually beat up Catholics that were passing in the street. The Catholics were disadvantaged greatly because of the prejudice that they faced by the Protestants.
There were a lot of thing that the Catholics were discriminated against and they were disadvantaged greatly in nearly all areas of life but the main areas that they were discriminated against was in their Housing and living standards which tended to be shabby, dilapidated and neglected. Also the vicious style, the ignorance and the segregation that the Catholics faced lead to the growing discrimination of Catholics.
