NI workforce in line with religious make up

Northern Ireland’s workforce is more in line with its religious make up than ever before, the Northern Ireland Equality Commission said today.

The fourteenth annual Fair Employment Monitoring Report released today showed that the composition of the Northern Ireland workforce for 2003 was 58.3% Protestant and 41.7% Roman Catholic.

Commenting on the figures, Joan Harbison, Chief Commissioner of the Equality Commission, said: “These returns record continuing progress towards a more equitable distribution of employment.

“When monitoring began there was still a substantial under-representation of the Roman Catholic community compared to their proportion among the economically active. That has been reduced throughout the intervening years. Where the Catholic share of the workforce in 1990 was 34.9%, the Catholic share for the same parts of the workforce in 2003 is 40.8%.”

Monitoring returns include more sections of the workforce than they did when first introduced in 1990, incorporating full-time and part-time workers and all firms with over 10 employees.

The 2001 Census shows that those of working age and available for work are 42.7% Catholic and 57.3% Protestant.

“In the public sector taken as a whole Roman Catholics are no longer under-represented although there is still some under-representation in security occupations and the councils. There are also areas of the public sector where Protestants are under-represented including education and health,” Dame Joan said. “The under-representation of Catholics in the private sector is also continuing to diminish.”

(MB)