Overall Result
Voting on Religious Grounds
Voting on Unionist/Nationalist Grounds
Changing Support for the Agreement in the run-up to the Referrendum

The Overall Referrendum Result

• 951,845 cast their votes, representing an unusually high 80.7% turnout.
• 676,966 voted Yes (71.12%).
• 274,879 voted No (28.88%).
• We believe that 57% of Protestants voted Yes, and 93% of Catholics. See details.
• We believe that 60% of Unionists voted Yes, and 94% of Nationalists. See details.

The Voting On Religious Lines

It was a well known fact that those in the Unionist and Protestant communities were much more likely to be against the Agreement than those in the Nationalist and Catholic communities. It would be very interesting to find out what proportion of the Protestant community voted Yes. Although this cannot be found directly, a good estimate can be found if we assume that those who voted did so in the same Catholic-Protestant proportion as the makeup of Northern Ireland as a whole; ie if we assume that 38% of voters were Catholic.

It is a simple matter to calculate the Protestant vote if we know the Catholic vote. The Catholic vote was an average of 93% Yes during pre-Referrendum polls - much more predicatable than the Protestant vote. We can assume therefore that Catholics voted somewhere between 85 - 100% Yes. Therefore we have calculated the total Protestant Yes vote for various assumed Catholic votes:

As you can see, even if the Catholic vote was 100% yes, then the majority of Protestants (53%) are still voting Yes. We can state with reasonable certainty that the majority of Protestants voted Yes on May 22 1998. As we stated above, the Catholic vote was an average of 93% during the pre-Referrendum polling, so we can suggest that the Protestant 'Yes' vote was 57%.

Voting on Unionist/Nationalist Grounds

Any analysis done involving figures for Unionism/Nationalism is bound to cause controversy, as all surveys get condemned by whichever group comes out worst. However, one of the major surverys in recent years was a survey on the issue done by Market Research Northern Ireland and Queens' University on 12-20 March 1998 which surveyed political aspirations. It found that 98% of Protestants and 32% of Catholics claim to be Unionist, and 2% of Protestants and 68% of Catholics claim to be Nationalist.

Using these figures we have repeated the same kind of analysis we did above, only this time for political aspiration. It is a simple matter to calculate the Unionist vote if we know the Nationalist vote. The Nationalist vote was an average of 94% Yes during pre-Referrendum polls - much more predicatable than the Unionist vote. We can assume that Nationalists voted somewhere between 85 - 100% Yes. Therefore we have calculated the total Unionist Yes vote for various assumed Nationalist votes:

As you can see, even if the Nationalist vote was 100% yes, then the majority of Unionists (58%) are still voting Yes. We can state with reasonable certainty that the majority of Unionists voted Yes on May 22 1998. As we stated above, the Nationalist vote was an average of 94% during the pre-Referrendum polling, so we can suggest that the Unionist 'Yes' vote was 60%.

These figures are all taken from opinion polls published in the media. The first column is the date that the poll was conducted. If no conducted date is given, then the date is the date of publication. The second column is the name of the organisation(s) who conducted the poll, and their sample size, if known. The last column gives the proportion of voters who voted each way. The 'undecided's have been removed, and the Yes/No values adjusted to make them percentages adding to 100%. Details of these polls are given in Appendix A.