For just over twenty years now surveys in Northern Ireland have been monitoring changing attitudes to equality issues and relations between the two main religious communities during periods of conflict, peace-building and devolution1.
While these monitoring statistics have provided much needed indicators on how the Northern Ireland public as a whole has perceived the situation on a year by year basis there has been limited analysis of the depth and richness of this dataset. Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland are not monolithic groups yet they are inevitably treated as such in the quest for rigorous measures of change.
This report digs deeper into data from the past in order to pull out the individual ‘stories’ of section of our population during those years, and to look to the future by providing evidence based recommendations for current policy.
The Long View of Community Relations in Northern Ireland: 1989-2012