Describe the disadvantages faced by the Catholics in Northern Ireland in the mid- 1960s?

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David Drayton

Describe the disadvantages faced by the Catholics in Northern Ireland in the mid- 1960s?

Catholics in Northern Ireland would obviously face disadvantages because the Catholics are living in a Protestant area and an area which wanted the British rule. The Protestants are not going to like the Catholics because they have been fighting against each other for many years. Catholics faced all sorts of disadvantages ranging from housing to politics so it was hard for them to live in Northern Ireland.

If you are a Catholic it would be hard for you to get employed by a Protestant run company or business. A quote from Ben Walsh says that Harland and Wolff shipyard employed “10,000 workers, of whom only 400 were Catholics.” This quote is from an educational book so it is believable and it is incredible because there are so few Catholics working in a company this big. This is understandable because the boss of Harland and Wolff might not want too many Catholics in case it caused trouble with the other 9600 Protestants. It could easily happen because there could be fights between the Catholic and Protestant workers and it could put the company’s reputation down. People who invest in company’s or who buy there products might not buy of them if they find out that they have Catholics working for them. So if you were a Protestant company owner you might not want any Catholics working for you because they could be the people who stop people investing in you. Therefore if you were a Catholic seeking to find a job it would be about 100 times harder than if you were a Protestant.

To strengthen this point “In Londonderry, an area with a Catholic majority, the highest-ranking Catholic in the education department was the official in charge of school meals.” So in a city as big Londonderry which at that time had a population of 72000, and the highest Catholic official was in charge of school meals, it showed you how hard it must have been being a Catholic in Northern Ireland. If you are the head of school meals there is no chance you can help you fellow Catholics because you would not have the power to do so. As a result there was an unemployment gap between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. In 1990 Curtice and Gallagher found that 63% of Protestants and 84% of Catholics believed there was some prejudice against Catholics in Northern Ireland. This is in 1990 that it came out that even the Protestants then could see prejudice against Catholics and it would be obvious to see because if you looked how many more Catholics were unemployed and there were more who were living in poverty.

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There are a lot of explanations of why there was such a big gap between unemployment in Catholics and Protestants. This brings me onto education because this might or might not be a factor which helped there to be such a big unemployment gap. In Northern Ireland there leavers from Protestant schools on the whole had better qualifications than leavers from Catholic schools. As well as this more leavers from Protestant schools went into employment than Catholic leavers. The politics and officials of a city if they were Protestant which they would most likely be made it harder for ...

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