`Generalising grossly, but hopefully, in the direction of a truth," says Professor John Haldane in an outstanding essay in this excellent collection, "I suggest that whereas the Scots of Catholic background tend to uncritical sentimentalism and are fiery in reaction to perceived or imagined prejudices and slights, those of Protestant backgrounds tend to insensitivity and are unyielding in their self-assurance."
It was a fiery assault last year on real and imagined prejudices and slights made by a young composer, James MacMillan, that inspired this book. His speech at the Edinburgh International Festival denounced his country as a land of "sleepwalking bigotry" and "visceral anti-Catholicism", yet itself demonstrated virulent anti-Protestantism and Catholic supremacism. Apropos the cultural revolution set off by the Reformation on art and music he remarked that "one could draw interesting parallels between Mao Tse-tung and John Knox, Pol Pot and Andrew Melville (well, perhaps not)" - breathtakingly insulting references to the founders of Scottish Presbyterianism. But then, as is so often evident in Northern Ireland, Protestants are supposed to have no feelings: as Graham Walker points out apropos the description in a Scottish newspaper of Orangemen as "in-bred lumpen scum" and "white trash", such insults "would be unlikely to have been permitted in respect of any other set of people".
MacMillan supporters featured here include the writer Andrew O'Hagan, who talks about how the birds on the trees sang sectarian songs in the west of Scotland, and Patrick Reilly, a retired professor of English who eloquently denounces as "lethal" the folk culture that encompasses such sectarian songs as The Billy Boys.
Critics include the historian and Catholic, Bernard Aspinwall, who accuses MacMillan and his supporters of being "stuck in their tardis around 1939, crying wolf or barking up the wrong tree at some imaginary threat" and being part of the long Catholic tradition of finding excuses for failure.
In the often angry debate that followed MacMillan's lecture, "one side," observes Walker justly, "has formed the impression victim-mentality founded upon relatively little in the contemporary as opposed to the historical context, while the other has tended to view any criticism of MacMillan as confirmation of his case" - a tendency particularly noticeable among those who describe the campaign for integrated education as proof of anti-Catholic bigotry.
That bigotry is a two-way street is a point made by several essayists and one which we would do well to remember in Ireland. (I am constantly irritated by ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by those who regard the singing of The Sash My Father Wore - a song containing no sectarian language - as offensive, while regarding militant republican songs about murdering policemen as a valid expression of our culture.)
The debate is summed up at the end by James MacMillan himself, who, although sticking to many of his guns, has his mind partially changed by what he learned here, for instance, about Presbyterianism. His speech had been made, he said, in the spirit of opening up a national religious debate to clear the air. His aim, that people be able to say: "I may not agree with you, but the free expression of your ideas allows me to see how things may not be as clear-cut as I had previously thought. I had not thought about it like that before."
We have had no such debate in Ireland about the immense differences between the Catholic and Protestant mind, no admission that Catholics are bigots too and almost total denial about the persecution of Protestants in the south after partition. Our rhetoric about pluralism was shown up by the shabby prejudice and cowardice of politicians on the issue of an Orange parade in Dublin. Will a Protestant James MacMillan please stand up.
Ruth Dudley Edwards's The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions was published last year by HarperCollins