Demography
Feeny is classified as a small village or hamlet by the NI Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) (i.e., with population between 500 and 1,000). On Census day (29 April 2001) there were 542 people living in Feeny. Of these:
- 29.3% were aged under 16 years and 6.6% were aged 60 and over
- 47.6% of the population were male and 52.4% were female
- 95.8% were from a Catholic background and 3.7% were from a Protestant background
- 7.8% of people aged 16–74 were unemployed
For more details see: NI Neighbourhood Information Service
The century of political and religious turmoil in modern day Northern Ireland has seen the village of Feeny move from a mixed village to being almost exclusively Nationalist.
In the 1911 Census the village recorded 149 inhabitants of whom 64 were from a Protestant background. The village had a demographic that was 57.1% Roman Catholic and 42.9% Protestant. Over the course of the century while the overall population of the village quadrupled in size the minority Protestant population had shrunk to just 20 inhabitants in the 2001 Census. This 39% fall in the Protestant community over the century is the third largest deterioration of a community from either side of Ulster's political divide in any village or district of over one hundred inhabitants behind the sharp declines of the Protestant communities of Derry City and Dungiven Village and marginally higher than the sharpest decline of a Roman Catholic community, experienced in Castlereagh.
Read more about this topic: Feeny