BIRW Submissions to UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion 2007

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BRIEFING FOR THE SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON FREEDOM OF RELIGION: NORTHERN IRELAND

British Irish Rights Watch is an independent non-governmental organisation that has been monitoring the human rights dimension of the conflict, and the peace process, in Northern Ireland since 1990.  Our services are available, free of charge, to anyone whose human rights have been violated because of the conflict, regardless of religious, political or community affiliations.  We take no position on the eventual constitutional outcome of the conflict.

The conflict in Northern Ireland is not about religion

Much of the media coverage about the conflict in Northern Ireland has represented it as being a struggle between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority.  Typically, Protestants have been described as being unionists (because they want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom), with those prepared to use violence to defend the Union (between Northern Ireland and Great Britain) being described as loyalists.  Catholics, on the other hand, are characterised as nationalists (because they want Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland made up of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), with those prepared to use violence being called republicans.  However, not all Protestants are unionists, and not all Catholics are nationalists.  Similarly, not all those describing themselves as loyalist or republicans are supporters of violence.

However, although often articulated in religious terms, the conflict in Northern Ireland was not really about religion but about territory.  At its heart lay the question of whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or become part of a united Ireland.  The conflict spawned two types of paramilitaries: the republicans, who saw themselves as freedom fighters in the cause of self-determination, and the loyalists, who saw themselves as defending the United Kingdom.  Thus republicans were anti-state, while loyalists were pro-state, with both groupings adopting terrorist tactics – murders, bombings, hijacking, etc – in pursuit of their aims.

The conflict also needs to be understood as one in which two of the three main protagonists (the third being the United Kingdom) regard themselves as minorities.  The Protestant/unionist/loyalist grouping is in the majority in Northern Ireland but is in a minority in the island of Ireland as a whole - and, indeed, within the United Kingdom - whereas the Catholic/nationalist/republican grouping is in the minority in Northern Ireland but can count itself part of the majority of Ireland.  At present[1], Catholics make up around 44% of the population of Northern Ireland, while Protestants make up about 19% of the population of Ireland as a whole.  Considering that the population of Northern Ireland is only 1.7 million, while that of all Ireland is 5.6 million, these are minorities to be reckoned with.  This simple set of proportions had profound consequences for the conflict but also for the peace process, and it helps to explain why human rights occupy a central position in that process.

There is still discrimination against Catholics on grounds of religion

One of the root causes of the conflict was discrimination by the Protestant community against the Catholic community.  On 1 February 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was founded.  Its demands mapped out at least some of the terrain over which the conflict was to be fought for the next thirty or more years: a universal franchise[2]; an end to electoral gerrymandering[3]; the fair allocation of public housing; an end to discrimination in local government employment; the repeal of the Special Powers Act[4]; and the disbanding of the exclusively Protestant reserve police force, the “B Specials”.  Catholics were no longer prepared to take lying down discriminatory laws and practices set down by “a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state”[5]. It was the violent reaction of extremist Orangemen[6], including off-duty members of the B Specials, to NICRA’s peaceful protest marches and the failure of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC, the police) to defend the protesters which laid down the battle lines for the conflict to come.

Many reforms have been introduced to meet the problems highlighted by NICRA, but Catholics still face discrimination in a number of areas, which are described below.

Discrimination against Catholics in employment

The proportion of Protestants of working age in employment (all economically active and inactive of working age) in 2003, was 72.5%, while the proportion of working-age Catholics in employment in 2003, was 62.9%.  The economic activity rate for those of working age was 76.4% for Protestants and 67.9% for Catholics.  In 2003, the unemployment rate for Catholics was 7.2% while for Protestants the figure was 4.8%.[7]

The Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998, as amended, makes it unlawful to discriminate directly or indirectly on the grounds of religious belief and/or political opinion in the field of employment.  However, the Order only applies to employers who have eleven or more employees, so small companies are not covered or regulated.

Discrimination against Catholics at the senior levels of the civil service

The civil service is the largest employer in Northern Ireland.  While Catholics are represented in proportion to their numbers in society, in that 44.7% of those employed in the Northern Ireland Civil Service are Catholic, the figure for the percentage

of Catholics employed in the Senior Civil Service is 30.4%, a gap of almost 12%.[8]

Catholic under-representation in the Northern Ireland Prison Service

The Northern Ireland Prison Service says that 80% of its staff are Protestant and only 9% are Catholic[9].  The NIPS has put an affirmative action strategy in place to attempt to redress this severe imbalance.

Catholic under-representation within the Police Service of Northern Ireland

Although they make up around 44% of the population, Catholics make up only 21% of the Police Service of Northern

Ireland (PSNI)[10].  As of 1^st January 2007 there were 2,156 Catholic PSNI staff, of whom 1,677 (78%) were police officers and 489 (19%) were support staff[11].

Figures issued by the Northern Ireland Office in late 2006[12] disclosed that only about 36% of applications to join the PSNI come from Catholics, and that that figure has been fairly static since the 50:50 Catholic:non-Catholic recruitment policy was introduced in 2001.  In the most recent round of recruitment, there were 3,136 applications from Catholics, but only 1,734 (55%) of these came from Northern Ireland Catholics[13].  This suggests that nearly half of Catholic applications come from residents of other countries.  While other Catholic communities in Northern Ireland should of course be reflected in the PSNI, they should not be counted for the purposes of redressing the indigenous imbalance in Catholic representation within the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

There have been several factors responsible for the low number of applications from Catholics.  First, the police service in Northern Ireland was traditionally drawn almost exclusively from the Protestant/unionist/loyalist community until the reforms recommended by the Patten Commission[14] were introduced.  Catholics did not consider policing as a career option.

Secondly, the republican movement actively discouraged members of the Catholic/nationalist/republican community from joining the police.  They saw the police as enforcers for a Protestant state who were responsible for violence against Catholics and did not defend Catholics from violence and other crimes.  Republicans believed that to join the police was to legitimise the Northern Ireland state and thus to betray the nationalist cause.

Thirdly, there is growing evidence that the police acted in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries to murder and otherwise attack Catholics[15], which was seen by Catholics, even if they were not republicans, as vindicating the republican claim that Catholics were the victims of police violence, who either actively encouraged it, actively participated in it, or afforded impunity to perpetrators.

Fourthly, until very recently Sinn Féin, the political party who represent the majority of nationalists in Northern Ireland, refused to take their seats on the Policing Board, which has oversight of the PSNI, because of the issue of collusion and because it gave them a bargaining counter in the peace negotiations.  This deterred many Catholics from considering a career in the police, even after the Patten reforms.

Fifthly, Catholics who have joined the PSNI have been targeted for attacks by dissident paramilitaries, mainly republicans, in an attempt to intimidate them into leaving the police service.

Retention and promotion of Catholics in the PSNI

Of the 2,420 student officers appointed by the PSNI since 2001, 70 have resigned or been dismissed.  Of these, 53 (76%) have been Catholics.[16]  In other words, three times as many Catholics as Protestants have left.  This suggests that Catholics are encountering problems within the Police Service of Northern Ireland which militate against their retention.

Of particular concern is the fact that since 1999, the number of senior Catholic officers has actually gone down from 16% to 12%[17].

Membership of the Loyal Orders within the PSNI

There exist within Northern Ireland a number of “Loyal Orders” (a time of freemasonry) with exclusively Protestant membership[18].  The best known of these is the Orange Order.  Its oath of allegiance commits its members to “strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome[19], and scrupulously avoid countenancing (by his presence or otherwise) any act or ceremony of Popish worship”.

Such an oath is incompatible with the oath of office taken by all new recruits to the PSNI (those already in office when the oath came into being were not required to swear it).  It reads, “I hereby do solemnly and sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all individuals and their traditions and beliefs; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof according to law.”

However, police officers are not barred from being members of the Loyal Orders while serving as a police officer.  When attempts were made to compel police officers to register their membership of such organizations they challenged the initiative through the courts, with the result that the PSNI has not been able to maintain such a register.

Sectarian crime

The conflict in Northern Ireland is essentially sectarian in character and sectarianism runs through virtually every institution to some extent.  Although much of this sectarianism has to do with the political nature of the conflict, much of it is overtly religious, with many attacks on Catholic churches and Orange (Protestant) halls.

So endemic is sectarianism in Northern Ireland that it is “the elephant in the room”, in other words, it is so big an issue that many are reluctant to acknowledge it or deal with it.

To give three brief examples of how sectarian crime can impact on society in Northern Ireland:

In 1999, Catholic human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson was murdered outside her home by loyalists using a car bomb.  Her life had been repeatedly threatened by police officers, and also soldiers, and repeated representations had been made to the United Kingdom about her safety by NGOs, the Irish and American governments, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on judges and lawyers.  However, the authorities took no steps to protect her.  At  least two of those suspected of her murder were police informers.  A public inquiry is due to be held into her murder.

One of Rosemary Nelson’s clients, Robert Hamill was murdered in 1997.  He was beaten to death by loyalists in Lurgan city centre.  His attackers did not know him but could tell he was a Catholic because he was walking from the direction of a dance hall frequented by a Catholics to his home in a Catholic part of town.  Four armed police officers sat by while he was attacked and did nothing.  There is also an inquiry due into his death.

In 2001, small girls and their parents were attacked for weeks on end as they made their way to the Holy Cross Catholic school in Ardoyne in West Belfast.  The police, politicians, and even the then Chief Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission portrayed these events as a dispute between nationalists and loyalists.  In fact, a loyalist faction had been displaced by an internal feud from their homes in the Shankill area and have moved into a small loyalist enclave that was too small to accommodate them.  They wanted to expand their territory by driving Catholics out and to assert their control by dictating the route people should take to the school.  Many children and parents were terrorized and some were hurt.  There were many complaints from parents that the police did little to intervene to stop the daily harassment and intimidation being suffered by children as young as four years of age.  The situation was eventually resolved, but many of the children will be marked for years.

It is no coincidence that these three examples all concern Catholic victims and also display collusion between police officers and loyalists.  Collusion has also been endemic in Northern Ireland and goes hand-in-hand with sectarianism.

Until recently, the PSNI did not even count sectarian crimes, despite a recommendation from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabularies that they should do so.  They have now begun to record sectarian crimes, but the statistics show what BIRW believes to be serious under-counting.  For the period 1^st April 2005 to 31^st December 2005 only 1,240 sectarian crimes were recorded[20] out of a total of some 118,124 crimes in the year 2004/5.  Although the time spans for these figures do not coincide, they suggest an extremely small percentage, perhaps 2%, whereas anecdotally an Assistant Chief Constable of the PSNI once told BIRW that over 50% of all crime in Northern Ireland is sectarian.

BIRW asked the PSNI who were the main perpetrators and who were the main victims of sectarian crime in Northern Ireland.  The Police Service of Northern Ireland was unable to answer because they do not record the information. [21]  It is BIRW’s belief that, were the figures available, they would show that there are many more attacks by Protestants on Catholics than the other way round.  In our view, until the authorities are prepared to ask and answer these questions, they will not be able to develop the necessary strategies or tools to address sectarianism.

BIRW is also concerned that the Police Service of Northern Ireland has not taken any significant steps to eradicate sectarianism within its own ranks.

June 2007

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04 July, 2007