It is a hoary old joke, or at least it was.A stranger is accosted in a Belfast ghetto and challenged to say whether he is a Protestant or Catholic. "I am a Jew," he says, to the thickheaded locals who would never have thought of such a possibility. "That's all very well," they say, "but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?"
The joke, until now, is in the question being unanswerable, but the question does have an answer. The stranger is a Protestant Jew. Or, at least, he would be a Protestant Jew if he wanted to join the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The House of Lords this week renewed the legislation by which jobs in the police in Northern Ireland are divided equally between the two sectarian communal blocks.
At least that was the intention of the legislation, but the precise categories by which new recruits must be taken in on a 50-50 basis are "Catholic" and "other".
And since a Jew is not a Catholic, he or she is bundled in with Protestants as "other".
But not all ethnic minorities and immigrants are "other". Poles, for example, are mostly Catholic and therefore are categorised among Northern Irish Catholics applying to join the police service. Indeed, the PSNI has been actively recruiting in Poland to help make up Catholic numbers.
This is an absurdity, given that the disadvantaged community, envisaged in police reforms, is the community of Irish Catholic nationalists, for whom the term "Catholic" is actually inadequate shorthand.
But those political parties that pressed for this reform are saying nothing.
They, understandably, don't want to open up a quarrel over immigration and employment.
What is happening here is that the sectarian boundary, between nationalist and unionist, Protestant and Catholic, is being extended out into the new ethnic communities.
If you want to join the police service in Northern Ireland and you are Polish, you stand in the Catholic recruitment queue (metaphorically, of course) and if you are Mandarin Chinese, Jewish, a Nigerian evangelical or "other", then you stand behind northern Irish Protestants.
This was never intended in the reforms. It is grotesque that we should be sectioning immigrants into native sectarian categories, and the fact that we did not foresee, only five years ago, that we would be doing this testifies to how rapidly Northern Ireland has changed, and is changing, into a multicultural society.
That should be good news and will be if we can make the transition without lining new communities up on one side or the other of our ancient quarrel.
But we haven't made a good start.
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