‘No status – no census!’ The causes and consequences of the 1971 and 1981 Northern Ireland census boycotts

Despite Northern Ireland having been established on the basis of statistics from the 1911 census and the centrality of religious demography to many accounts of its conflict, little has been written about the political history of census-taking there. This paper contributes to addressing this oversight by exploring two related controversies in that history: the 1971 and 1981 census boycotts. Through use of archive materials, it demonstrates how concerns about the privacy of personal information collected by the census against the backdrop of the Troubles, were mixed with broader motivations whereby the census was seen as a symbolic target for protest and boycott in the context of discrimination against Catholics and the republican movement’s campaign for political status for its prisoners, with the 1981 boycott taking place during the hunger strike of that year. Despite a perhaps surprisingly low rate of overall non-response to the census given calls for it to be boycotted, the boycotts did have a significant impact and a legacy that lasted into the 1990s – by which time republicans’ attitude towards the census had changed for the positive.