The Faith And The Fury

Ask any publisher to come up with a list of subjects which are sellable , sexy or hip and it s pretty certain that the Protestants of Ulster would come close to the bottom. Dour, bigoted and frostily arrogant (at least according to legend), the north s majority community are generally regarded, whether in Britain, the Republic or further afield, as an unappealing bunch.

It comes as a surprise, then, that Susan McKay s recently published Northern Protestants An Unsettled People makes entertaining and illuminating reading; indeed it has proven so popular that it is already on its third print run.
Though McKay is well-known in the southern media for her clear-eyed journalism in The Sunday Tribune, the writing of this, her second book, was fuelled by more than objective inquisitiveness. McKay is herself a Northern Protestant, who was brought up in Co. Derry. This is a study of the people I uneasily call my own, she writes in the epilogue, and the phrase aptly captures the complexity of her feelings.
For the book, McKay conducted interviews with over sixty Protestants.
The study is broken down into various geographical areas of significance, so though McKay listens to the shady paramilitaries of North Belfast and Orange hardliners in Portadown, the affluent Gold Coasters of North Down and reluctant power-sharers of Derry also have their voices heard.
There are, as a result, many telling insights. One woman at Drumcree describes residents of the Garvaghy Road sitting on their fat ass: big fat women and the men sitting there smoking all day ; Grug , one of the UFF team which came close to assassinating Gerry Adams, expresses his admiration for the National Front: Everyone else was condemning us and these people came along carrying Ulster flags and Union flags and they loved us. You sort of latched on to it.
There are also more thoughtful voices, including those of critic and broadcaster Tom Paulin and singer-songwriter Juliet Turner. As well as providing a more moderate view of the political situation, these figures also bring some sense of a non-threatening, artistic Protestant culture to the book. Turner, for instance, explicitly links her present career to growing up in the Methodist church.
Was McKay keen to offer this sort of diversity as an antidote to the clichid image of grim Prods?
Yes, that was a part of it, she says. People here [the Republic] know the Paisleyite image so the image of the Protestant is that of the booming, loud-mouthed bigot. But they don t really go beyond that stereotype, and, as a result, they have no understanding of Unionism as a politics.
Also, ever since I started working for The Sunday Tribune around 1992, I found myself being drawn more and more towards stories about loyalism and loyalist paramilitaries. One of the big themes in the book was exploring the ambivalence which Protestants often have to the issue of violence.

McKay is neither blind to the suffering of the Protestant community in the north, nor prone to excusing that community s inconsistencies. Such ambivalence has been part of her attitude since childhood. She recalls, aged about 13, threatening her parents with the idea that she would run off to join the British Army, yet by her late teens she was journeying to Bogside bars, seduced by the music of the likes of Christy Moore and Planxty.
I would have been instinctively inclined towards the Republican view of the North at that age, she explains. I used to wear a little tricolour on the lapel of my coat. My inclination was towards being Irish rather than being militantly Protestant or needing to be called British.
Not a practising Protestant, feminist and socialist beliefs have long since become pre-eminent for her over the tribal polarities of life in the north.
But did her Protestant background make it easier for her to get honest interviews when she was researching the book?
I think it probably did, even though I was very careful to be honest about it and refer to my Protestant background . But people do make assumptions which, in itself is a bit disturbing. One woman, for instance, who had been very mild, saying, there s no trouble around here , when she eked out my background, turned and launched into a very angry attack on Catholics.
Did any notion of some essential Protestant character come to the fore?
Well, I would be quite reluctant to get into that area, because it can come very close to something which is essentially racist you know, people who say, oh, you can tell by looking or their eyes are closer together . I was interviewed about the book by a supposedly very sophisticated British journalist who told me that I looked like a Catholic, she laughs.
Having said that, I think that there are certain things felt very strongly within Protestantism, she goes on. For example, there is an acute sense of demoralisation, which came through in the RUC debate. It also amazed me the number of loyalist people I met who talked with envy about the leadership nationalists have. With Adams and McGuinness, and Hume as well, they feel that they have all these charismatic leaders. Protestants feel our day has passed .
Isn t this also partly fuelled by the idea that the honest Protestants are going to be eclipsed by the sneaky Catholics ?
Yes, there is that element to it, McKay agrees. There is an attitude that the other side is better at propaganda than we are . I think that can be very dangerous because it can imply that any complaints from the Catholic community are purely propaganda. In Derry, for example, a woman told me that no-one was killed on Bloody Sunday; that the bodies which were brought to Alnagelvin Hospital were still thawing from having been stored elsewhere. She believed that these were victims of IRA gun battles who had been specially stored up for such an occasion.
McKay s approach in Northern Protestants is to let the naked sectarianism of some interviewees speak for itself. Still, this hasn t made the book any less controversial, with some fundamentalists claiming that no-one should read it (one of these, a member of the Independent Orange Order, went on to dispute McKay s eligibility to write it, furiously and erroneously claiming that her father was a leading light in the Alliance Party ). In contrast, the PUP s David Ervine, described it as frightening but true .
Though McKay does not evangelise within the book s pages, she did, she says, feel an obligation to write it.
You ve got to try and make a contribution to finding a way out of the dangerous and destructive situation in the north, she comments. I think it behoves me to look at my own people, and see how their attitudes are contributing to things being as they are, but also, in other areas, how they might be showing signs of flexibility and change.
Her book is not without hope. The most rebarbative elements of Protestantism certainly come through loud and clear, but the picture McKay draws has depth and subtlety. Northern Protestants is a true portrait of a people more often seen in caricature.

Northern Protestants An Unsettled People by Susan McKay is published by Blackstaff Press, #12.99

I Would Like To See A United Ireland

I was born and brought up on the outskirts of Belfast. I don t remember first becoming aware of being Protestant. I do, however, recall being brought to watch The Twelfth , though I was so young at the time (five, at a guess) that any political or sectarian meaning was way beyond my grasp.

My reaction a mixture of excitement at the spectacle and apprehension at the crowds and the noise would have been the same, whether the marchers were declaring their allegiance to loyalism, republicanism or rastafarianism.
The area where I grew up was mixed, but its schools were not. I attended Carryduff Primary until I was eleven: it was exclusively Protestant. St Joseph s, the nearest Catholic Primary, was only a mile or two away, but the schools pupils remained almost entirely ignorant of each other.
In the playground, I heard terms like taig and fenian for the first time, but they were bandied about in the same way as other bad words, the meaning of which we understood hazily, if at all.
I have few strong religious memories. As a small child I was frequently but irregularly taken to the local Presbyterian church by my mother (my father, a socialist, generally opted out of these trips). There, I would wonder why a supposed promise of everlasting life had rendered the congregation so joyless and, during the minister s stiff sermons, would drift into contemplating whether I could make it from one side of the roof to the other by swinging on the chandeliers.
I was also a sometime member of the Boys Brigade, a strange Presbyterian counterpart to the Boy Scouts, whose militaristic activities (marching and drill combined with bible study) disturb me more now than they did then.
After the 11-plus exam, I went to Methodist College, Belfast. Despite the name, it was considered one of the most liberal of the city s schools. Even so, I can still remember each of the Catholics who made up at most 2% of my year. They weren t, to my knowledge, bullied or consciously discriminated against, but an unspoken sense of difference hung over them.
The religious ethos of the school, though much diluted, could still be discerned in the proliferation of Christian Union-type societies (populated by terribly nice-but-earnest pupils with names like Edwin and Glenys) and in the presence on-site of a College Chaplain, who taught Religious Education as well as attending to ill-defined pastoral duties . He was a deeply unpleasant man, bullying or oleaginous depending on circumstance. Many of the other teachers were excellent Secularism 1, Religion 0.
Around the same time, I was becoming politically conscious. My home was unusual in that my father exhibited not just the virulent anti-English attitude which is more common among northern Protestants than is often realised, but also a (much rarer) keen, and proud, sense of Irishness. Discovering that the conflation of Protestant with Unionist was only a relatively recent phenomenon came as a welcome surprise to me, and consolidated my growing feeling of sympathy with the ideas and aspirations of nationalists.
I also felt revulsion at much of what was referred to as Protestant Culture . I viewed The Twelfth as little more than a festival of intimidation and thuggery. The pronouncements of Unionist leaders were little better. Ian Paisley would pepper his speeches with references to how he was articulating the beliefs of the Protestant people , yet I, and numerous other Protestants I knew, found his views and campaigns odious.
The heroes of my youth were certainly not demagogic politicians. I cheered Alex Higgins and Barry McGuigan on to their respective world championships with equal fervour. Later, the music of Van Morrison seemed to touch on a spirituality that had little in common with the dour narrow-mindedness I saw all around me.
Morrison was also one of a handful of public figures who clearly saw little contradiction between being Protestant and Irish. They were few and far between Stephen Rea and Beirut hostage Brian Keenan were the only others I was aware of. ( I can still recall my anger when a relative announced that Keenan should have been let rot in his Beirut cell. His crime in her eyes, was being a Northern Prod who carried an Irish passport rather than a British one).
Later still, on moving to Dublin, I found my Protestantism was little more than a source of good-natured slagging from friends. The idea that I have suffered because of it in any way is bizarre.
I welcome the continuing decline in the power of the Roman Catholic Church in this state. I would welcome a similar decline in Protestant fundamentalism in the north even more.
My girlfriend is from a Catholic family, as are almost all my friends. Such details are irrelevant to my day-to-day life. I am not ashamed of my Protestantism; it simply means little to me. I attend no church and believe in no organised religion.
One last thing: I would like to see a United Ireland in my lifetime. I hope it will be one where both the old dividing lines of Protestant, Catholic or dissenter , and the newer ones of race and colour melt into nothing.