The numbers game in Northern Ireland means that it is all to play for

These words are being written in the province of Ulster.

However, no member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary ever patrolled near my house and the Ulster Unionist party do not canvass me for my vote at election time.

However, Google maps will quickly tell me that my abode is in the North of Ireland.

One of the many things that Ulster Unionists aren’t very good at is geography.

For their sake, I hope that they’re a bit better at counting.

The most recent figures for the school population in Northern Ireland and should be a wakeup call to the DUP in particular.

This Province was carved up by Partition in 1921.

The Irish delegation was threatened with “immediate and terrible war” is they did not sign up to the Treaty that ended the War of Independence.

The reason on that Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan were cut off from the other six counties of Ulster was quite simple.

Demographics.

The Six County statelet was so fashioned as to give a 2-1 ethnoreligious majority that would guarantee that Northern Ireland would always have a unionist majority.

The newly established parliament Stormont instigated a series of laws that drew the admiration of the Apartheid regime in South African.

The South African Minister for Justice in the Apartheid regime, introducing a new coercion bill in April 1963, commented that he “would be willing to exchange all the legislation of that sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act.”

That was coupled with institutional discrimination in employment across the Six Counties and the allocation of social housing on a sectarian basis.

The entire policy was intended to force each generation of nationalists to weight up their options.

It was hoped by the staunch Bürgermeisters in Stormont that emigration would keep the numbers of Taigs to a management minority.

The 1944 Education Act passed at Westminster allowed for free university education throughout the UK.

By the mid-1960s there was a cohort of working class graduates from a nationalist background in the Six Counties.

They spearheaded a demand for Civil Rights.

They were inspired by Rosa Parks and not by Pádraig Pearse.

The RUC reacted to their peaceful agitation with batons and CS gas.

It turned out that Northern Ireland was a police state without enough police.

The British government sent in troops to stabilise the situation.

Operation Banner lasted from 1969 until 2007.

At the root of it all was the “threat” of a growing nationalist minority.

Now, the figures for working-age population indicate that the future demographic landscape of the Six Counties will be decidedly unstaunch.

Now, the days of minority status for those of a nationalist background are coming to an end.

This does not mean that any future Border poll would be won, but it changes the mood music of a statelet that was set up on a tribal headcount.

The ethnoreligious background of the populace is still a major predictor of in the psephology of the Six Counties.

What it does mean is that the days of the ethnoreligious based unionist majority are over and is now a thing of the past.

Consequently, unionist political leaders who want to maintain the constitutional connection to Britain have to reach out to nationalists and afford them parity of esteem.

Now the centenary of the Northern Ireland statelet is only two years away and it could prove to be bittersweet for those unionists who can count.

If Ukania is to hold onto the Six Counties of this province then Unionists will have to reach out to a community that they have othered for over a century.

Should they fail to do that then their statelet is in real trouble in the years ahead.