Targeting social need: Why are deprivation levels in Northern Ireland higher for Catholics than for Protestants?

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 re lates the level of deprivation of the individuals in the sample to their pe rsonal characteristics and circumstances, In particular, it examines the po ssibility that while higher deprivation levels among Catholics may have bee n partly due to the fact that they possessed, to a greater degree than Prot estants, the attributes that were correlated with deprivation, it may also have been the result of Catholics being penalised more harshly than Protest ants for possessing these attributes.