NATIONALIST representatives yesterday ridiculed an economic research paper which challenges the widely held belief that religious discrimination plays a major part in keeping the rate of unemployment among Catholics more than twice as high as that among Protestants in the North.

The authors, Dr Graham Gudgin of the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre and Prof Richard Breen of Queen's University, concluded that the ratio of Catholic to Protestant unemployment "cannot be used to infer the presence or absence of fair employment".

Instead, they suggest the higher Catholic unemployment rate is attributable mainly to the greater birth rate among Catholics. Other factors they suggest include migration rates, average age and where people live.

The SDLP spokesman on employment, Mr Sean Farren, said in a statement yesterday that the report's claim was ludicrous and many other reputable studies had pointed to the conclusion that discrimination of a structural kind must have existed to explain the high level of unemployment within the Catholic community.