Remain - a majority

55.8% Remain - 44.2% Leave

The vote in Northern Ireland for the EU Referendum that took place in June 2016 showed a majority of voters wanted to remain in the EU.

Q. Was vote choice in the referendum largely driven by the deep underlying ethno-national divide in Northern Ireland politics?

A. Table 1 suggests that it was.

Catholics overwhelmingly voted to stay by a proportion of 85 to 15 while Protestants voted to leave by a proportion of 60 to 40. Similarly, two thirds of self-described ‘unionists’ voted to leave while almost 90 percent of self-described ‘nationalists’ voted to remain (Table 2).

When identity is examined very similar results emerge. Sixty-three percent of British identifiers voted to leave compared to only 13 percent of people who describe themselves as ‘Irish’. Interestingly those who identify as ‘Northern Irish’ tend to vote to stay, with almost two thirds doing so. And the same strong patterns emerge when attitudes to the constitutional future of Northern Ireland are compared to referendum voting: 85 percent of those in favour of Irish unity voted to stay while only two fifths of people in favour of Direct Rule did so.

These results very clearly show that how people behaved in the referendum on voting day is very strongly predicted by their core ethno-national characteristics. The referendum divided leavers from remainers; equally, it divided Protestant unionists from Catholic nationalists.

From the Academic Paper: The EU referendum Vote in Northern Ireland: Implications for our understanding of citizens’ political views and behaviour
John Garry
Professor of Political Behaviour, Queens’ University Belfast

See also: Joseph Rowntree Foundation: 
Brexit Vote Explained