IT IS known locally as the “ratchet effect”. A Catholic or a Protestant feels unsafe living in a neighbourhood dominated by the other group and moves out. Others follow. “It reaches the point where that minority thinks, ‘uh oh, I’m the only one here’—and leaves,” explains Jennifer Hawthorne, of Northern Ireland’s state housing executive. “Once an area is segregated, they never come back.”
The peace process notwithstanding, Northern Ireland remains a territorial place. North Belfast is criss-crossed by “peace walls”—high fences separating Catholic streets from Protestant ones. The province’s residents still reflexively seek to place strangers in one group or the other, through surnames or by asking what school they went to. But the ratchet has finally slipped a notch.
Ian Shuttleworth of Queen’s University Belfast has used census data to construct an “index of dissimilarity” for Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants. This reflects the proportion who would have to move in order to spread themselves evenly across the province’s 582 wards. A score of 0 represents perfect integration and 1 means complete segregation. Between 2001 and 2011 the figure fell from 0.62 to 0.58. The proportion of Catholics and Protestants living in wards with at least 80% of their own group fell, too. It is the first significant drop in segregation since the 1970s.
The process is uneven. The most Protestant neighbourhoods—often in the north-east, away from the Irish border—have mixed more than the most Catholic ones. That is because Protestant numbers are falling, and immigrants are moving into vacated houses. Take Church ward, in Craigavon. Between 2001 and 2011 the Protestant share of the population declined from 94% to 76%. Immigrants, three-quarters of them from eastern Europe, now make up 12% of the ward’s inhabitants. Many of them are Catholic, and counted as such in the figures—but, being born overseas, they stand apart from the sectarian divide.