There were harsh disadvantages for the Catholics in employment as well. This can be observed in Source A. In source A it shows that in the Belfast Shipyard –the biggest single source of employment in the city, out of 10,000 workers just 400 were Catholics – the rest Protestants. Many industries or businesses employed only Catholics or only Protestants. This was not a deliberate policy; it usually relied on the location of the business. For example, if the location of a business was situated in a Protestant area, the workers there would be Protestants. The political control what Protestants put forth in local government was reflected in the way the councils discriminated the Catholics. It was common for highly educated Catholics to find that they lost their interview to not very educational Protestants. The reason for this was because they were Catholic. Protestant organizations like the Orange Order, favoured this discrimination.
Civil Liberties was the area in which Catholics faced personal disadvantages. Protestants saw Catholics as being disloyal. The law enforcement agencies such as the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) was made up of mostly Protestant majority, because of this they tended to disregard the Catholics rights on arrest and in the dispensation of justice in the court. A special powers act was passed in April 1922, which gave the RUC more power than any other police force in the United Kingdom. Even though this law was to be applied to the Catholics and Protestants equally, to the Catholics this law seemed to be used more against them than against Protestants. The majority of judges and magistrates were Protestant; they tended to apply the law more harshly on the Catholics so even if they went on trial, and the Catholics knew that the judges would be biased.
The council housing was distributed on an unfair basis. The councils used their Protestant power to allocate good houses to Protestants and bad houses to Catholics. Source D illustrates the quality of the houses given to the Catholics. In the source you can see that they had outside toilets, and outside washing facilities. Some of the houses given to the Catholics were deemed unfit for human habitation. They were expected to pay the same amount of rent as the Protestants. A key factor in this disadvantage was employment, Catholics got low paid jobs. It has been easy for the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland to guarantee that Catholics have poor housing because historically Protestants and Catholics have lived separately in cities such as Belfast and Derry. New council housing tended to be built in Protestants areas.
Catholics also faced discrimination in education because the resources allocated by the council and government were more in favour of the Protestants. There were separate schools for the Protestants and the Catholics. The idea of separate schools has a long history. Before the partition in 1922, after the Protestants victory at the Battle of the Boyne, the Protestants passed a series of ‘Penal Laws’ against the Catholics. One of these laws forbid Catholic teachers and carried a penalty of life imprisonment. For the next 100 years, Protestants churches ran the only legal schools in Ireland. Catholics ran illegal ‘hedge’ schools for their children. Then in 1831, the British Government provided some money to pay for schools for both groups. The government wanted these schools to be for both Catholics and Protestants, but the churchmen on both sides insisted on separate schools. When Northern was set up in the 1920’s, another attempt was made to have mixed schools; churchmen on both sides again wrecked this. Most Catholic and Protestant youngsters played different sports, and went to different scout troops, youth clubs or other organisations. Nowadays Catholic schools are generally named Saint something and school leavers who indicate that they are from Catholic schools find it difficult to find jobs. Secondary, representing Northern Ireland at sports at school levels is mainly for Protestant students. Catholic people, no matter how good they are at the sport, are never selected. This kind of discrimination can be seen in source B; it states that when Protestants see a lad who is talented in a sport, the third or fourth question is “What school did you go to son?” if the answer is Saint something then suddenly the boy is no longer talented. Since 1974 many teachers have tried to bring pupils from separate schools together.
It is clear that Catholics were treated unfairly by Protestants and faced many disadvantages. Not all Catholics faced these disadvantages; there were some who had very good jobs, good homes and no problems with the RUC. The Catholics who faced the greatest disadvantages were concentrated in the run-down working class areas of Northern Ireland.