Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground

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There's a dominance of voices at the moment saying 'This will be a disaster, this will be a difficult summer, we can't rule out violence'. These voices are given a lot of prominence in the media, and it is very disturbing. It makes people feel uneasy and a bit fearful. What I found striking was that it wasn't difficult at all to find women to speak to me, or non-binary to speak to me - there are lots of LGBTQ in the book, lots of women in the book, lots of people who aren't part of political parties. Read More Related Articles

Seamlessly weaves together personal stories and political events with deep emotional intelligence … Vital reading in all senses of the word.My creativity emerged from the cognitive dissonance of growing up queer in a milieu that found me unpalatable and odd,” she said. She has returned to north Down with her English wife and child to make films and live by the sea. “Digital natives have access to ideas that go far beyond those imparted by the traditional cultural sources that informed their parents’ imaginations,” she observed. “There is a fluidity to their sense of persona and identity.” She likes the sense that Northern Ireland “has unclenched somewhat”. I just thought, aye, well I’ll form my own opinion here,” she told me. (Martin McGuinness was, in her estimation, “a bad rascal”.) Men who had been stirring for a return to violence for months showed teenagers how to make petrol bombs, then stood cheering on the footpaths like dads at a school sports day. They did grim interviews in which they blamed the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and said it must be scrapped. An attempt is being made to groom and radicalise a new generation of boys to believe in violence and sectarian hatred. I think the British people got a bit of an eye-opener into the DUP when they held the balance of power in Theresa May's government, and I think it's fair to say they didn't get a very flattering view of what unionism represented.

Google me," he said. "There's reams about me in the media" accusing him of all kinds of crime. "There's no evidence for any of it", he says. But there are other influences at work now. Women who have held communities together through generations of disadvantage are demanding a voice in public life. As Eileen Weir put it to me, “working class women are streets ahead of the politicians”. With Northern Protestants - An Unsettled People, I wrote it at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, and it was interesting to see the range of reactions from Protestants. Susan believes there will be plenty of new insights and surprises for readers interested in learning about this community.

The DUP now seems very out of step, and I think the UUP had been on social issues as well, until very recently. Amnesty International did a poll recently where they shared that 67% of DUP voters felt that abortion should not be regarded as a crime. So their politics are out of step with the views of their voters.

It wasn't until I was sixteen that I met and talked to protestants my own age. Some of them liked the same music as me! We shared a love of similar books and movies! There was an initial wariness but the barriers soon came down, or as much as they could as the conflict was still ongoing. It still wouldn’t have been safe to visit each others areas. But yet, here we were in a shared, safe, space, mingling and socialising together. And hey, now they weren’t wearing those uniforms, the protestant girls…….. Susan said that, during her interviews, a large percentage of people wanted to talk about issues relating to poverty, rights, and social justice, which is not always reflective of how Northern Ireland Protestants are characterised by their political classes. The idea of Naíscoil na Seolta was to provide a religiously and ethnically integrated group of toddlers access to the Irish language through the medium of play. Funds had been raised, teachers appointed, walls brightly painted, toys propped up on shelves, tiny sofas and chairs installed. But as excitement built, those opposed to the project were launching a campaign to have it stopped. They set up social media accounts, circulated a petition and put up posters in the area, in which Ervine’s face is superimposed so that she appears to be standing among Sinn Féin leaders as an election candidate. Keyboard warriors piled in claiming that the community was concerned and “key stakeholders” should have been consulted about this contentious and “devious imposition”. Tweed left the DUP in protest when his old hero Ian Paisley Sr signed up for power sharing in 2007. He became a councillor for the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party. Its leader, Jim Allister, also declared himself “deeply saddened” by the death of Tweed, a “larger than life character”. It was “a devastating blow to his family and wide circle of friends”. After Brown spoke out, he denied any disrespect. He said Tweed’s conviction was overturned and he was “not going to be bullied into saying the court was wrong to acquit”. Brown said she was “disgusted”, pointing out that in 2016 the conviction was quashed on a technicality.In 2019 Conor Mitchell’s glorious Abomination: A DUP Opera was performed at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, its script based on transcripts from the infamous interview, which had been conducted by the controversial journalist Stephen Nolan at his ruthless best. Anton now lives in Brighton and has found a home for his “religious sensibility” with the Quakers. This book is a very impressive collection of verbatim interviews with a broad spectrum of people who fall under the umbrella of Northern Protestants.

I think there's a traditional thing within unionism, when there is an election, to scare people and hype things up and make Protestant people feel like they need to to vote DUP. In the past, the Official Unionist Party used the same tactic. Read More Related Articles A man told me that reading the book had “almost” ruined his holiday on a yacht in Turkey. Two men edited a book in which they dismissed mine as “a deeply self-flagellating tome” and a “personal exorcism of Protestant self-loathing”. But Barry White wrote in the Belfast Telegraph that it had “dug deep into a damaged psyche”.

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As young DUP councillor Dale Pankhurst put it to me, “it’s the paranoia in the psyche”. He was speaking in the context of a young Catholic woman and her children having been intimidated out of moving into a house they had been allocated in Tyndale, in north Belfast. People might have thought, he reasoned, what if such a person is “a real hard-line republican?” Trojan horses come in many cunning disguises. The DUP has resorted to its traditional route of drumming up electoral support, instilling fear that the other side is otherwise going to come and take away everything you hold dear: Your home, your identity, your flags, and your culture. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.