Edited 10/11/17, 2/20/18, 2/21/18, 3/12/18, and 5/3&4/18:
The Northern Ireland Effect: The Harland and Wolf Shipyards built the Titanic and the RMS Britannic and were one of the most successful yards in the world. Catholics made up less than five percent of the workforce in the yards in the late 60s, though they represented more than a third of the population of Belfast. This socio-economic effect was representative of employment in the private sector in Belfast, a free enterprise system run primarily by the British and by Northern Ireland Protestants, an infrastructure of opportunity and oppression that evolved in Ireland over hundreds of years of serf-slavery, conflict and war, and in Northern Ireland more specific to the socio-religious-cultural realities of Ulster. The Catholics were/are the descendants of the indigenous Irish population, contained by hundreds of years of rebellion and war; the Protestants mostly descendant from lowland Scots and English colonists. As each people evolved separately but together in Ireland -- and eventually what became Northern Ireland, U.K. -- Catholic neighborhoods suffered greater unemployment and so the dole: greater poverty, lesser education; then poverty-driven alcohol abuse, violence, crime, rebellion, etc. Though both peoples are white, the difference in evolution of the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was/is dramatic. In America, the evolution of poverty, violence, in black neighborhoods (the descendants of slaves and Jim Crow laws), Hispanic barrios, Native American reservations, where many of the indigenous people of this country are contained (after hundreds of years of rebellion and war) and live in often-isolated communities, and (by variation) formerly, coal-driven economies in white, often-isolated areas, of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, suffer from the Northern Ireland effect. The effect wasn’t, isn’t, ethnically, racially generated, or due to an inherent lack of ambition or a weak work ethic, it is because of an economic lack of equal opportunity; because of educational inequality; because of poor and unequal access to quality healthcare; because of injustice within the application of the rule of law and inviolable human rights; because of poverty-driven violence; drug and alcohol abuse… generation after generation.
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