WHEN Ashok Sharma was called by the police early one morning in September 1993, he feared the worst. This was central Belfast at the height of the Troubles, more than two decades of conflict between nationalists and loyalists in Northern Ireland. Sure enough, on rushing to the site of his Indian restaurant on Dublin Road, he could see only “a big hole in the ground; it was completely gutted”. A huge IRA car bomb had exploded outside, aimed at a nearby loyalist building. It cost Mr Sharma £80,000 ($120,000) to do the place up again, less than half of which he got from the government in compensation.

After opening in 1985, the Archana restaurant suffered bomb damage nine times. Yet Mr Sharma and his family, who came to Belfast in 1977, have stayed, even as many young people have moved away. His persistence is one reason why a new report from the Resolution Foundation on employment rates for people from ethnic minorities finds Northern Ireland the only region where such minorities outperformed the average, at 72% of their working-age population. (Ethnic minorities in Scotland, outside Glasgow, do better on employment rates, but still worse than the regional average.) In other areas of Britain, the disparity is far bigger; in the north-east outside Newcastle, for instance, only 48% of working-age Britons from ethnic minorities are employed (see chart).

Minority report

Researchers from the Resolution Foundation point out that the gap between the best- and worst-performing subregions for all working-age people is just 11 percentage points, but it more than doubles to 26 for the black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) group. If Britain is to achieve full employment, as the government hopes, this inequality must be put right, argues Laura Gardiner at the foundation. So can Britain learn from Northern Ireland?

Certainly, Northern Ireland is somewhat anomalous. Its working-age BAME population is small, at about 20,000, or just 2% of the total. That may be only slightly less than in rural Britain, but the share rises to fully 40% in inner London. Moreover, the Troubles shaped immigration in a specific way. Many Indians and Pakistanis who came to Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s were professionals, taking up health-service and other jobs that were hard to fill because of the violence. That means they are probably better educated than their mainland equivalents. And many are entrepreneurs like Mr Sharma.

Yet analysts maintain that laws passed in Northern Ireland to help end the Troubles, and specifically to bridge the sectarian divide between Catholics and Protestants, have helped ethnic minorities. They point to fair-employment legislation from 1989. This made applying for jobs a more “formalised process”, says Eileen Lavery of the Equality Commission, to make the workforce more representative of the population. “This should act in favour of those from ethnic minorities,” she argues. There is anecdotal evidence that it helps the 40,000 or so from eastern Europe, particularly Poland, who have come to the province to find work since 2004.

Brenda Skillen, a Catholic convert to Islam who works in a local Muslim support group, says that section 75 of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has also made a difference in promoting equality of opportunity for all, not just for Catholics. Reforms to policing and the criminal-justice system have made them fairer for everybody, she adds. There is still racism against ethnic minorities. But Northern Ireland’s particular history has meant that the authorities, having neglected diversity for so many decades, now take it more seriously than their counterparts in mainland Britain.