James O'Brien: Catholics outnumbering Protestants in NI could spell beginning of end of UK
22 September 2022, 16:03
Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time
James O'Brien argues that Catholics outnumbering Protestants in Northern Ireland could be the beginning of the end for the UK, as he shares personal details of his own Irish heritage.
There are more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time in over a century since the partition, the latest census results have revealed.
“46% of the population are now Catholic, 43% are Protestant or another Christian religion”, James O’Brien said in his monologue.
He said: “I would imagine…this surely is the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom isn’t it?
“How can it not be, given that essentially after partition, Northern Ireland was the sort of Protestant enclave where Catholics for generations were treated as third, fourth, fifth class citizens and remained in a minority while southern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland was the Catholic sovereign nation if you like.
"You now have a majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland and indeed a majority or at least an electoral victory for the republican political party…this to me feels like the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom."
James added: “The idea when I was 10 or 11-years-old that we would sit here in 2022 and actually talk about Northern Ireland as a place where Catholics are in the majority…we’re looking at something absolutely huge, something portentous, something that may have a profound and permanent impact upon the very future of the United Kingdom.”
James linked the results to the issue of national identity.
He said: “It depends, I think in part on how old you are, but everybody British has some sort of relationship with Northern Ireland whether you have Irish heritage as I obviously do, or not - not least because of the Troubles, not least because of the fact that the IRA’s atrocities on these islands in Great Britain, defined a generation almost.”
He shared how his father was the Midlands Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, and referred to how “The Birmingham Six was a story that obviously, given the later acquittals, ran through his career like the River Thames runs through London.”
The Birmingham Six were six Irishmen wrongly convicted of the IRA’s bombing of a Birmingham pub in 1974, which killed 21 people. They were each sentenced to life imprisonment and later acquitted.
James said: “When I was young you would even as someone with an Irish surname, get treated similarly to how Muslims were treated when Islamist atrocities, Islamist terrorism began to kick off.
“You’d have that idea that because you were Irish you were somehow complicit or because you are Irish you must be a terrorist, which is, as a kid, absolutely nonsensical.”
He recalled how, at around 11 or 12-years-old, he was called a "terrorist" by another child at his "very sort of middle class, upper middle class exclusive prep school…a very strange experience”.
James said younger generations would remember The Good Friday agreement, explaining that “is actually why you don’t have as complicated or serious a relationship with Northern Ireland as both a concept and a territory as older people do. You haven’t lived under the shadow of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland itself or indeed terrorist activity in Great Britain”.
