Q1. Study Source A. What can you learn from Source A about t he disadvantages faced by the Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1960’s? The disadvantages you can learn by source A that the Catholics had to face are mostly to do with the working environment.
All of the big companies that employed hundreds of employees, however these companies took favouritism in Protestants and the Catholics new this!
For example in a Belfast shipyard, which was the biggest source of employment in the city, it contained 10,000 employees and only 400 were catholic! This proves the disadvantages that the Catholics had to face; they had fewer job opportunities, which is against their human rights. Another example to show that the Catholics are being treated badly would be employees at Fermanagh County Council altogether totalled 370 people and out f this 370 employees Protestants filled the top jobs and 322 other jobs. Another job that was very sought after was a bus driver because of the hours you had to work and all of the holiday you get but this only gave advantage to seven Catholics out of the whole 75 bus drivers!
Q2.Study Sources B and C. How useful are these sources in helping to access the extent of discrimination against Catholics? In my opinion the sources give you a brief encounter but something that you need to read into and develop further and they tell us a lot about what sort of thing they were discriminated with. Things from football to what kinds of jobs you could get. Source B explains to us that no matter how good this boy was at playing football when the manager found out he was a catholic he didn’t want anything to do with him. He stated that he ‘ kicked with the wrong foot.’ this is basically saying that if you are not a protestant then you can’t be good at anything and you ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ be accepted by different members of the public i.e. protestants! In conclusion it is giving us a classic example and stating that in every persons head at the time they were thinking, “protestants are better than Catholics in every way” which is pure discrimination at its best.
