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(by Ed Maloney, Sunday Tribune)
Whatever the outcome of the Stormont Talks there are many people who believe that the real engine for change in Northern Ireland is sex, reproductive sex that is, and in particular a Catholic propensity to do it better than Protestants. It is this, they believe, which will in the not too distant future make NI a gradually but inexorably more Nationalist place to live in.As one might expect in Ireland this proposition has develeped into one of the most intense and heated debates of recent years not least because the disciples and opponents of the view each accuse the other of distorting the facts for political purposes. Basically those who believe that it is happening are accused of peddling Provo propaganda while the opponents are reviled as antedeluvian Unionists.
In the green corner are people like Niall O'Dowd, the New York publisher, peace process activist and friend of Gerry Adams and Tim Pat Coogan, the former Irish Press editor and prolific writer.
Writing in the Irish Times just after the second IRA ceasefire O'Dowd employed it as the classical argument why Unionists should sit down and negotiate with Sinn Fein. "For all the parties", he wrote, "there is ..the lurking reality of the demographic tide which could well deliver a nationalist majority in Northern Ireland relatively early in the next century".
In other words the Catholics are going to outbreed you so you better deal now before its too late. What O'Dowd didn't mention was that the same argument is used in SF's internal debates to justify the ceasefire and the peace process.
Tim Pat Coogan has been approaching the argument from a different angle and comes closest to providing impirical evidence for the view in the form of voting figures showing a lower Unionist turnout these days and a higher Nationalist one.
Writing in last week's Ireland on Sunday he said: "In the October'74 general election, the Unionists got 62.1 per cent of the vote and Nationalists 29.7 %. In last May's general election, the vaild vote had risen by some 90,000 but the Unionist percentage had fallen to 50.5 % and the Nationalists had gone up to 40.2 %...the Nationalists are clearly heading for a majority".
In the blue corner are former FG Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald and Northern academics like Paul Compton and Professor Richard Breen, all of whom, whisper the critics, are motivated by anti-Nationalist views of one sort or another.
They have one advantage over the 'outbreeders' in that they have produced a detailed statistical study of demographic trends. This was written by a Northern civil servant, Edgar Jardine of the Department of Finanace and Personnel. That sort of background is of course enough to damn him in the eyes of the 'outbreeders' but his figures and arguments are worth looking at.
The first point that Jardine makes in his 1994 study is that the big Catholic population explosion could be over. His evidence from the last three census results are fraught with problems not least the fact that two of them, in 1971 and 1981, took place during political crises which produced a large Catholic boycott. Nevertheless his figures show a steady drop in the Catholic birthrate from 25.4 per 1,000 in 1971 to 19.5 per 1,000 in 1991 while the non-Catholic birthrate, while also falling appears to be stabilising at around 14 per 1,000.
Computing that along with death and migration rates he predicts a possible net Catholic growth of 6,000 per year. With the two populations separated by some 280,000 (42.1% Catholic to 57.9% Protestant) it would by 2037 before there was a Catholic majority and perhaps 2057 before there is a voting majority.
Even then, the critics argue, that doesn't necessarily translate as a Nationalist majority since not all Catholics are Nationalists - some are Alliance and some of the SDLP variety only lukewarm supporters of Irish unification.
Nevertheless while it seems the 'outbreeders' are wide of the mark in predicting it this as a vehicle to trundle us all into a united Ireland "early in the next century" it does look as if there are going to be more and more Nationalists for Unionists to deal with.
In local communities the degree of sectarian violenec is often dictaed by population balances. This explains why North Belfast with its growing Catholic population has been one of the most violent areas in the Troubles. Translate that into macro, NI terms and you could have a recipe for wider and wider violence.
No matter what the figures say the perception has taken root that Catholics are outbreeding Protestants. When one looks for reasons to explain Unionist nervousness at the Stormont Talks this has to be one of the factors.