This article addresses two issues. First, using data drawn from the Sample
of Anonymised Records of the 1991 Northern Ireland Census, for over
13,000 individuals, it constructs a deprivation index and then, using this
index, compares the deprivation levels of Catholics and Protestants.
Second, it relates the level of deprivation of the individuals in the sample
to their personal characteristics and circumstances. In particular, it
examines the possibility that while higher deprivation levels among
Catholics may have been partly due to the fact that they
possessed, to a greater degree than Protestants, the attributes that were
correlated with deprivation, it may also have been the result of Catholics
being penalised more harshly than Protestants for possessing these
attributes.