Posted on 12/17/2002 7:56:26 AM PST by dead
It's bad news for the Protestants. Census figures due out tomorrow could show that for the first time in the 81-year history of Northern Ireland they are in the minority. And what's worse, those fecund Catholics are younger and breeding faster.
The dawning realisation has prompted one Ulster Unionist MP to declare that Protestants should be allowed to veto a united Ireland, even if Catholic voters become the majority.
Forcing Unionists to join the republic would cause political instability which would be in no one's interest, Jeffrey Donaldson said on Monday.
But even if the census results do show a Catholic majority, the youth of the Catholic population compared to the ageing Protestant community means it could be at least 20 years before the rise in the number of Catholics translates into a voting majority.
At the same time, the simple equation of Catholicism with Irish nationalism does not take account of how many Catholics might vote to remain with Britain or Protestants to leave it.
But Thursday's revelations will be pored over and debated by politicians.
Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's minister of education, has said his party would hold the British Government to its promise of a united Ireland, if the majority votes for it in a referendum. Another spokesman said the Unionists faced a challenge in accepting the democratically expressed will of the people and encouraging a peaceful transition.
But Mr Donaldson argued that because the suspended Stormont assembly requires separate majorities of Unionists and nationalists to pass legislation, the dual consent principle should apply to any vote on a united Ireland.
He insisted the Unionist population would not be eclipsed in the near future, but warned: "It's not in anyone's interests to force Unionists into a united Ireland.
"It would be a recipe for great instability and constitutional disaster."
Since Northern Ireland's formation in 1921, the Protestant descendants of Scottish and English planters, concentrated in the six counties to the north-east of Ireland, accounted for two-thirds of the population.
Catholics made up the other third, giving unionists a seemingly in-built majority and leading to domination and discrimination which reinforced Catholics' feelings that they were second-class citizens.
But now a mix of factors, including underestimation of Catholic numbers because of the nationalists' refusal to co-operate with previous surveys, has led some statisticians to believe that the Catholic population could be anywhere from 40 per cent to 45 per cent and Protestants somewhere between 47 per cent and 51 per cent, with other religions and the non-religious making up the rest.
Four of Northern Ireland's five cities, Belfast, Derry, Armagh and Newry, now have Catholic majorities. Only Lisburn does not. Last year there were 173,000 Catholic schoolchildren, 146,000 Protestants and 22,000 others.
I hope you see the point of my post, which is not negated by teh typo (however funny it indeed was).
This kind of exchange is a perfect example of why the Internet cannot yet replicate a real conversation.
That is a typo. Right vs. write is a homonym? or brain misconstruct?. I notice I slip like that more often than I used to. Lots of intelligent people on the internet goof like that all the time and spell checkers, of course, don't catch it. I don't use spell checkers in casual conversing on the net.
Is this this an invitation to the Irish to get out of the USA?
There are some glimmers of hope, though. The Mormon birthrate remains high. Evangelical Christians, especially the most conservative faction, homeschoolers, are enjoying an increase in their birth rate. There is a small faction of conservative Catholics (also often homeschoolers) that long for their church's pre-Vatican II authority and teachings that are favorable to larger families. What appear to be declining groups are: mainline and moderate Protestants, Jews (outside the Orthodox faction), "Novus Ordo" Catholics, and atheist, agnostic, and New Age adherents. These are the groups out of which the white liberal elite is drawn.
Barring the effective closure of our borders (not likely with TPTB in control), it is likely that whites will be a minority, first in the Southwest and then generally. But the parallel decline in numbers and clout of the white liberal elite and their co-thinkers in the college educated middle classes means that the Gramscian/Marxist dream of a multicultural, "value neutral" socialist order controlled by a "soft" police state or mass psychological manipulation will likely fail.
The second says, "I've got that beat, here's Patrick Clancy, 97 years, can you believe it?"
The third says, "That's nothing. Here's one here who lived to be 143."
"What's his name?," the others ask. "Miles. From Dublin."
In my case, that is the most frequent reason. I read and post in parallel with my main work, and one sometimes interferes with another. Having worked for 10-12 hours on a paper involving buyers and sellers, for instance, I can (and have) easily write "tought" (instead of taught) just because I previously wrote the word "bought" a hundred times. I switch windows, read the posts of others, and reply, but my brain often refuses to follow.
Another thing is poor coordination, which manifests itself in "teh" that you kindly called a typo. It is strange, but sometimes I skip over several letters, which (I think ) is another brain misconstruction (and the reason for using a spell-checker).
With so many sins of my own, I do not mean to sound holier than thou, but like you I am distressed to see that people do not know the difference between "your" and "you are," for instance, or between "who" and "whom." It is safe to say that this is not a misconstruction or similar shortcoming: most of these people have been taught to learn the language phonetically and not required to read much. For them, it is not the problem of a faulty retrieval from memory but the absence of a correct construct in memory. It is not the individual shortcomings that bother me, therefore --- G-d sees I have plenty of my own --- but the legitimized ignorance. Sorry again for my own contribution.
Then I have found that there a lot of finer points concerning language usage that went over my head. I would be hard put to teach an English class, although in all modesty, I dare say I could do better than some we have teaching it now . . .
I don't pick at posts and made the awful blunder of writing to the Nightline newsletter writer when he made a similar mistake. I think it is in reaction to people who post here to constantly put down people such as myself who are a product of the public schools. I and mine (not me and mine - there is an important rule here :-)) seemed to get a pretty decent education in our local integrated public schools.
lie lay its it's your you're . . . there are rules dammit and they should be followed!!! :-).
What have I wrought here? My daughter is badgering me and I can't keep my train of thought in responding to you.
Teddy Roosevelt said the same thing to the WASPs of his day. They were rapidly passing from a substantial majority of the US population, to a minority group. Even as far back as 1900, the educated elite white population was failing to reproduce itself. Here's what Roosevelt told them:
[after enumerating the facts that showed the original settlers of the US were being overrun] Do you think I pity you? Far from it. Any race that doesn't have enough self-respect to reproduce itself should cease to encumber the ground and should give way to others who do.If Teddy were alive today, he might give the same speech to all the people of the United States and Europe vis-a-vis the emerging populations in South/Central America and the Middle East. If we cannot be bothered to reproduce ourselves, we should cease to encumber the ground, and prepare to give way to the Hispanics and the Muslims.
Well, this actually cuts both ways. Ever wonder why there aren't that many radical, pro-abortion feminists any more, and why the ones that remain are so darn old?
There's a silver lining to every cloud. Unfortunately, however, these people are not really as stupid as they seem. They know that they are not reproducing themselves, so they go out and recruit the children of those who are. That's why your typical college campus is little more than a recruiting ground for gays and marxists.
Maybe the Protestant churches shouldn't have been so agreeable to promoting contraception!
:-)
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