People forget the disadvantaged Protestants. Last week, in an ordinary village, they were having a barbecue at a bungalow converted into a community centre.
The exciting smell of the smoke drifted across the new-mown verges of the road outside. The kids were swarming around the house. "Can I get in to practise my karaoke?"
They knocked on the window. "What'll I do? I haven't enough money to pay for a burger. . ." The adults inside were crowded into the kitchen, chopping heaps of onions, unscrewing the tops of ketchup bottles. It couldn't have been a more innocent scene.
Except that there was a little girl of six or so, a girl with a wan face, wearing a dirty anorak too heavy for the summer evening. "She was in the pub late one night last week," a man told me. "And I said to the publican, `that's right out of order, mate - a kid that age in the pub'. And he said: `Leave it. She's safer here than she would be at home'."
Then the man continued: "We're like that, us Protestants. We don't talk about these things. We don't show our problems out."
Next door to the kitchen, in an office, a young community worker was taking a group of bored 10-year-olds through the first session of an alcohol-and-drugs awareness course.
"But they're only children!" I said to an organiser. "That may be. But do you know how many drug dealers there are in this village? There are five drug dealers."
I looked at the men and women who make this centre such a warm place. "But can't you get help?" I asked. "Where?" the man said. "John Hume is our MP and he won't do anything for us because we're on the edge of the city and we're Protestants."
`When did we ever ask him?" a woman colleague cut across him. "We never asked John Hume for anything. You can't say he didn't help us if we didn't ask him." Then they had an argument about the man's assertion that this village of 3,500 residents gets a grant from Derry City Council exactly the same size as the one given to the Creggan Camera Club.
"But what do you keep going on, then?" I asked. "What paid for all those bottles of tomato ketchup?" They said the pool table made them £40 a week.
"We're 20 years behind the Catholics. We thought our country would look after us. But since Stormont went, its been Englishmen and English women. . ." Yet this is a loyalist village, in the sense that "if you ran around here in a Celtic shirt you'd get into trouble". But they have no paramilitaries. "The kids spray UVF and that on the walls. But they're only kids."
Only kids? Do the boys of this village not stone the buses of Derry City supporters when they are coming home from away matches? Do kids paint the kerbstones red, white and blue? But the community volunteers put a lot of it down to boredom. Certainly, there's almost as much trouble between the youth of this village and the youth of other working-class Protestant enclaves near Derry, as there is between them and Catholics.
They hardly ever meet Catholics.
The kids of this village, three or four miles from Derry, have been to the city side of Derry only once or twice. The kids on a Protestant estate only a mile from the city centre are equally wary of crossing the bridge across the Foyle.
"They don't want to go across to Foyle College, and it used to be the Protestant school. They'll travel 16 miles to Limavady instead. They're afraid of being beaten in the toilets in the middle of town if they go there to socialise and they're identified as Protestants. They don't want to go across to Derry tech. There's going to be new arrangements for training teenagers. I'm telling you now that if the training is on the city side there'll be a lot of Protestant teenagers on the dole."
Education and training are at the heart of the problem of poorer Protestants. A community worker on this estate, visibly far more deprived than the village, says: "The majority of the young ones here are heavily involved with loyalist groups. When we asked them what was their dream, it was to meet some of the famous loyalist terrorists. And to travel to Belfast to see the loyalist murals. But if they were offered a job - any job - they'd take it anywhere. They'd work with Catholics, no problem, if it meant they had a wage. . ."
We were sitting in the battered, boarded-up community centre office. "The money for community development goes to Belfast first. Then it goes to Derry Catholics. Protestants like us get hardly any government money," the workers here say. They want to work developing their own young people. "They have no confidence. If they're challenged about their identity they know so little about it they take to name-calling."
That's true. There was a horrifying series on Radio Foyle called Expresso. When young Protestant men spoke about Catholics there was the same emphasis on unfairness that you hear from respectable community workers. "The Taigs can run riot," a youth said. "But we have nothing to burn. We have nothing. Though it was the Protestants built the city."
But above all, there was savage contempt for the others, with little accompanying pride in themselves. These are among the things they said: "Taigs are getting knocked off. We don't care." "Fair play to the LVF." "The Taigs are like animals. They just want more and more, them and 20 wains." "They're stupid, Taigs. They're dirty. Protestants wouldn't wear jeans to a funeral. . ."
The man who made the Expresso programmes works in a Protestant village a mile or two from Derry city centre. He and his colleague are in a world network of conflict-situation workers, associated with the YMCA. One is just back from the Palestinians in east Jerusalem: the other is on his way to the war in Liberia.
They solve more homely crises daily. A young man has lost the version of a job he had. "I told her to give me some blank payslips and I'd be up to her at the weekends but the first time she rang I wanted to play rugby. . ." Everyone knows this kind of story.
The difference here is the bitter feeling that the Catholics get the benefit of every initiative and the Protestants - having been all but hunted from that west bank of the Foyle - get nothing.
"Not a word is said about it," this community worker says. "There's complete silence about the demography of Derry. But when you've lost loved ones, statehood, wealth, opportunity - and when you're still not getting anything like the opportunities the Catholics are getting. . . Reconciliation, I can tell you, is very far away."