In January 1983 the Northern Ireland committee of the coalition government, elected a month earlier, identified the growing support for Sinn Féin/IRA in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the hunger strikes as a serious threat to the security of our State, and indeed to that of the island of Ireland, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
It was decided to prepare the way for a negotiation with the British, led by Margaret Thatcher, that would be designed to reverse her government's dangerous and counter-productive over-concentration on security measures. We were concerned that her government should instead address the continuing grievances of the minority nationalist population. Failure to tackle these was driving increasing numbers of moderate nationalists into the arms of Sinn Féin.
Over two years later this approach yielded the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985, and in the next Westminster general election, one-fifth of the Sinn Féin vote switched back to the SDLP. This caused Gerry Adams in 1986 to begin the process that eventually led to the abandonment of the IRA's "Armalite and ballot box" strategy and to the peace process.
The direct benefits that the 1985 agreement brought to Northern nationalists included the establishment of the Police Complaints Commission, the introduction of a procedure for complaints against the British army, and a code of conduct for the police.
There were also many improvements in judicial procedures; three ghettoised blocks of flats in Belfast were replaced; the divisive Flags and Emblems Act was repealed; and nationalist representation on public bodies was improved.
But in the long run, by far the most important reform secured by that agreement was a commitment to new and much more effective legislation for fair employment, which took the form of the 1989 Equal Opportunities Act, with its provisions for affirmative action and its huge cash penalties for employment discrimination.
The editors of a recent book on fair employment in Northern Ireland, bringing together the results of extensive academic research, remark that it was not until an analysis was made of 1971 census data in 1975 that the evidence of Catholic disadvantage in the labour market was revealed, although, of course, anecdotally it had been known for decades.
As late as 1981 one authoritative expert felt able to state that discrimination was a minor factor and that far more important factors were the higher birth rate of Catholics and their geographical distribution - a view now "comprehensively refuted", according to the editors of this book.
It shows that great progress has been made since 1999 in tackling discrimination in employment, with the result that in sectors such as education and health Catholics are now actually over-represented. However, they remain less well placed with respect to manual and security employment. Between 1990 and 2001 the Catholic share of manual and security employment rose by between one and four percentage points only.
By contrast, in better types of employment such as management, the professions, clerical, secretarial, and sales, the Catholic proportion of employment increased by between seven and 11 points.
The overall proportion of Catholic employment rose during this 11-year period from 35 per cent to 39.5 per cent - the latter being quite close to the 2001 Catholic share of the working population.
However, the proportion of the Catholic labour force without any educational qualification remains higher than for Protestants, and, possibly because the least progress in Catholic employment has been made in manual occupations, the proportion of Catholics unemployed is still twice as high as in the case of Protestants.
A contributory factor here is the fact that unemployment is highest in the predominantly western parts of the North, where Catholics are in a majority.
A crucial factor in the changes in the pattern of employment in Northern Ireland is education. Many Catholics turned to education "as an avenue to upward mobility" - because they did not have the same access to employment as did Protestants, who could "network" for jobs within their own community and who had access to some employments that were effectively closed to Catholics, e.g., shipbuilding and some associated trades.
Consequently, as traditional industries declined, many working-class Catholics "may have been culturally better placed to benefit" from new employment opportunities. Education, together with geographic mobility, is seen as "enhancing chances of Catholic mobility into the upper non-manual strata".
Thus, while a higher proportion of Catholics than Protestants still lack any educational qualification, at the other end of the educational spectrum Catholics have now outpaced Protestants. Whereas in 1971 almost three-quarters of graduates were Protestants, by 2001 the proportions for the two religions were almost equal, and the proportion of Catholics aged 25-44 with a higher degree was almost 40 per cent higher than for Protestants in the age group.
It has to be said that this latter situation reflects the consequences of a serious Protestant "brain drain" from Northern Ireland. In the late 1990s almost half of young Protestants seeking higher education - but less than a quarter of Catholic students - went to universities in Britain, and only a small minority of them returned to Northern Ireland.
This in part reflects the fact that some Northern Ireland Protestant students have tended to follow the English "rite of passage" custom, which involves an early move away from home, whereas Irish students have always been more inclined to attend a nearby university. A consequence was that first Queen's University Belfast, and later the University of Ulster, came to have a majority of Catholic students, perhaps in turn reinforcing the process.
This high rate of migration of mainly Protestant students now constitutes a serious, but rarely discussed, and I think little researched, problem for Northern Ireland, which needs to retain and foster as much talent as possible. Otherwise there could be a further damaging shift in the relative contributions of the two parts of Ireland to its total output - a shift that has already dramatically reduced Northern Ireland's proportion of that output from about 38 per cent in 1953 to about 24 per cent half a century later.
- Fair Employment In Northern Ireland A Generation On, edited by Bob Osborne and Ian Shuttleworth, the Blackstaff Press 2004, £10.99