Ballymena deserves its title of buckle in Ulster's Bible belt. It has 27 officially recognised places of worship, 12 of them Presbyterian, including the Rev Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in Toome Street. There are Congregationalists, Elim Pentacostalists, Methodists, Baptists, Church of Ireland, Salvation Army and two Catholic churches, including the Church of Our Lady Mother at Harryville, where the Saturday evening Mass was besieged by mobs of braying loyalist protestors during recent summers.
This seemingly Godly town of barely 30,000 souls now has another, less well-known reputation. As the centre of Northern Ireland's small but growing heroin problem, it is simultaneously a God-fearing, smack-dealing town.
According to local RUC sources, there are as many full-time heroin dealers, all addicts and all selling to feed habits, as there are places of worship. Ballymena has a problem, not yet on a par with Dublin's, but bad and almost certainly heading quickly in the wrong direction.
The apparent dissonance here - heroin openly available on the streets of a centre of evangelical Protestantism - is not surprising to anyone who has seen the benighted housing estates surrounding the town. Ballymena changed long ago from being an uncomplicated Victorian market town set on the fertile mid-Antrim plain, where the fervour of Protestant evangelism made an impact on local life. Evangelism - and Orangeism - are still important forms of cultural expression, although there are now shopping centres and a multiplex cinema open on the Sabbath, once observed by total closure of the town's shops and few playgrounds.
In the 1960s, just as the planners in Dublin were laying out their sprawling amenity-free city suburbs, their counterparts north of the Border were laying waste inner-city slums and transforming the countryside around Belfast and towns such as Ballymena into strikingly similar suburban wastelands.
While Dublin has had places with heroin problems such as Ballyfermot, Tallaght, Darndale and Coolock, Ballymena now has Ballykeel I (and the imaginatively-named Ballykeel II), Dunclug and Castle Demesne.
If your view of social and housing conditions in Northern Ireland is one of Catholics living in squalid ghettos while Protestants have all the fun, then you should visit the loyalist ghettos around Ballymena, Antrim and southeast Antrim. Foreign journalists and commentators on the North almost never visit these estates. Only a few local journalists tend to give them more than cursory attention. So there is very little focus on their existence or their problems.
A large portion of the people living in these estates are as deprived of social amenities and support as any Catholic living in the much better known estates of west Belfast and Derry.
There was a brief period in the late 1960s and 1970s when Ballymena and other predominantly Protestant "new towns" did have jobs and new factories. Then, the factories closed and a despondency fell on estates such as those in Ballymena, from which they have not recovered. These are mean places.
Just as drugs spread from the inner-city slums of Dublin to its equally deprived outer suburban estates in the 1970s, heroin came knocking in Ballymena in the early 1990s, brought in, it is said, by locals who had picked up a habit while living in places such as Glasgow and Manchester. Until then the drug had been found only occasionally in the bohemian quarter around Queen's University in south Belfast. The paramilitaries, both Loyalist and Republican, frowned on drug use and any hint of heroin abuse on their patches would have been dealt with, probably, by way of executions - this was often cited by sympathisers as a good reason for supporting urban terrorism.
In May 1996 the first significant find of heroin was made by the RUC in Ballymena. Some 34 grams were found in the garden of a house in Larne Road. The seizure merited little media or political attention. One local paper noted that "Ulster has very few registered heroin users compared to the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain".
Then the finds began to grow. The Belfast Telegraph reported that 230,000 Temazapan tablets had been found in a Belfast warehouse in February 1997. Temazapan is the most frequently abused heroin substitute in Scotland, from which most of Northern Ireland's heroin problem was coming. Still, the alarm bells were not ringing.
In another haul in July 1997, the RUC found crack cocaine in a house in Larne Road where the first significant heroin seizure had been made over a year earlier. Two months later, more crack was found in an estate in the neighbouring town of Cullybackey.
Now, anyone with a knowledge of popular culture will know that Cullybackey is the North's equivalent of the idiot rural idyll, a Protestant version of Father Ted's Craggy Island. Finding crack cocaine in Cullybackey is like finding a field full of Friesian cows in Los Angeles.
The impact of heroin in Northern Ireland has only begun to be appreciated in the past year or two. Earlier this year, the Belfast Telegraph ran front-page stories about the growing number of overdose deaths, after three inquests in one week. One of the first to attract attention was the death in March last year of Gary Cathcart, a talented footballer who once had prospects of a career in Premier League soccer. An inquest heard that, while succumbing to a life of heroin addiction spent mainly in estates around Ballymena, he spoke out about the ignorance of Northern Ireland's heroin problem and, particularly, about the neglect of addicts.
Cathcart was 31 when he was found dead in a flat in north Belfast by his girlfriend. He was described by David Warwick, who runs a drugs education project in Ballymena, as "a very, very brave young man . . . he had been off the heroin but must have slipped back." Warwick said that Gary had been a real trier who had wanted to go public and "highlight a lack of support services for recovering addicts."
Another Ballymena man, Jimmy McDowell, 28, died on March 28th last year after taking a number of 100mg morphine tablets and drinking alcohol.
It is likely, although not officially acknowledged, that Northern Ireland has probably by now had its first heroin baby. Last year it was reported in local newspapers that a health centre in Ballymena had detected a Class A drug in the blood of a three-year-old girl.
There is a lack of specific data about heroin addiction in the North. In March last year there were a reported 162 registered addicts, most living in the Ballymena area or sourcing drugs there. Northern Ireland has a much smaller drug problem than either the Republic or Britain. However, it is growing - figures released by the Home Office in April showed a 10-fold increase in Class A drug seizures between 1987 and 1997.
As happened in Dublin in its early approaches to the heroin problem, Northern Ireland is showing the same failure to grasp the nature of the problem and the same remarkable lack of imagination. There is the expected mix of responses, from well-meaning to hard-edged, most of which have been seen before in cities with established heroin cultures.
Last October the RUC was reported as saying that a coherent strategy for "tackling Ulster's drug problem" already existed. The "strategy" included a public information campaign, the "improvement of drugs education in schools", the circulation of an information booklet and support for research into drug trends.
The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) launched a booklet: YMCA Drugs Peer Education Project - The Experience 1995-1998.
It was reported that McDonalds, whose outlets are ubiquitous in the North, had withdrawn plastic spoons (which, it was claimed, were being used to measure out heroin) and replaced them with flat stirrers.
What is described as a "key" element in the North's official anti-drugs campaign has been the development of "a research and information strategy" by an organisation with the catchy title of the Central Co-ordinating Group for Action Against Drugs (CCGAAD). Britain's so-called "drug czar", senior police officer Mike Trace, flew in for a conference in Coleraine in March last year. "Overall", he said, he was optimistic about the situation.
Three years ago the Customs and Excise started what was called "an anti-drugs drive" by sticking advertisements on buses, bearing the legend: "Let's tackle drugs together". This has since been replaced by less subtle but probably more effective advertisements offering cash rewards for information.
The latest "hard" approach has been to bring in the RUC riot squad, known officially as the Divisional Mobile Support Unit (DMSU), the same people you see on television confronting loyalist and republican mobs at Drumcree and the Ormeau Road.
In a media set-piece earlier this year, TV and newspaper cameras were invited to see the Ballymena DMSU smashing down the front door of an alleged drug dealer's home in Ballymena. This is a common form of publicity-grabbing - but it is an ultimately ineffective police response.
It might be noted that gardai allowed an RTE camera crew to accompany officers on a similar raid on a flat in north central Dublin last year, producing highly disturbing images of young children screaming in distress at the early morning intrusion; one little girl was dressed in her primary school uniform when the camera crew arrived. Such an invasion by police and the media is now being outlawed in the US after test cases before the Supreme Court.
Local media in the North, however, largely welcomed the RUC door-smashing response. The Belfast Telegraph referred to the "no-nonsense squad nicknamed `The Enforcers' drafted into the town to boost the fight against drug barons". This type of language will be familiar to any newspaper reader in the Republic.
Despite these genuine efforts, the experience of other urban areas afflicted by heroin is that the problem will grow. It's also likely that, as the North's paramilitaries wane in power as the peace process continues, there will be a growth in organised drug trafficking. Several former terrorists are already up to their eyes in drug dealing and, according to usually reliable local sources, some of these people are staying ahead of the law by passing information about their erstwhile "political" associates.
There does appear to be an intense shyness on the part of Unionist politicians who represent the badly afflicted estates. It seems to be an issue which is either beyond their ken or one which they choose to ignore. One of the very few to speak out about the problem in Ballymena has been the former rugby international, Davy Tweed, who accused people of sticking their heads in the sand.
"There is a view that this is the Ballymena Bible Belt and things like that do not happen to us," he warned after a succession of seizures in the town two years ago. "Well, it does and I have seen it."
Tweed's calls for assistance to help addicts rebuild their lives were met with murmurs that he was bringing the town's reputation into disrepute for the sake of self-publicity. Such is the inward-looking nature of local Unionist politics, which choose, it seems, to ignore the problem.
The local MP, the Rev Ian Paisley, who lives in an elegant road off Cyprus Avenue, 40 miles away in east Belfast, has a rather lower profile as an anti-drugs campaigner. It may have slipped his notice that, while he was heading the vanguard in Ulster's war against Popery and republicanism, a plague ship was dropping anchor in his own constituency.