Percentage against Protestants uncertain

N. Ireland job bias in face of Catholic growth
NEW evidence has come to light that the percentage of Catholics in the North of Ireland is higher than previously thought, yet discrimination against Catholics in employment continues.
The Government had previously supposed that Catholics made up just over 31 per cent of the population in the North. But a new survey indicates that the real figure may be nearer 42 per cent. The explanation is said to lie in the unwillingness of Catholics to cooperate in the Government census of 1981.
Supporters of the Provisional IRA persuaded many to boycott the census. so many Catholic and Republican parts of the region returned lower than the genuine numbers of residents. A new estimate has been published in Belfast's Sunday News, giving the total number of Catholics in the province as 665.000, more than 42 per cent.
The Government machine realised it had underestimated the total returns, but added only 74,000 to the total, instead of the 151,000 estimated by the Sunday News survey; Its findings were based on Catholic parish figures.
At the same time an official report by a British Government agency has found evidence of serious and constant discrimination against Catholics in employment in Northern Ireland, the report by the Fair Employment Agency has not yet been published.
The agency has been in action for seven years, with the remit of findings ways of counteracting job discrimination against Catholics. The survey it mounted, and which is expected to be published before the end of the year, looked at some 20,000 non-manual jobs.
Even in official positions it has been found that in what should be a typical municipality, proportionally scarcely half the number of Catholics indicated by the population figures were employed.
The Fair Employment Agency has in at least one case required the local authority to monitor appointments with the aim of reducing employees to the proportion of Catholic and Protestant working people found in the population at large.
Since 1976, up to 5,000 employers have agreed to avoid discrimination on grounds of religion in their appointments.