Some years ago - when a member of the 1993 Opsahl Commission on Northern Ireland - I watched in dismay as a generally good-humoured schools assembly became badly polarised along sectarian lines. Some Catholic teenagers had spoken of petty harassment by the security forces. This provoked the updated centuries-old taunt about all Catholics being "rebels", "disloyal", "Provo supporters ". There was uproar. "Just look at us," shouted a distraught Catholic girl. "We're behaving just like our parents generation" - reproof indeed!
There is much in Susan McKay's timely and courageous book to show that such Protestant stereotypes of Catholics are alive and well and not confined to the older generation. That loyalists should have chosen to throw maggots over the merchandise of Dunnes stores perceived as "Irish", for which read "Catholic ", in Portadown at the time of the 1998 Drumcree stand-off was symptomatic of an extreme Protestant view of Catholics as dirty and barely human. McKay attended a DUP meeting in Tyrone, where the audience laughed and clapped at one speaker who compared Catholics to the greedy pig in the muck, taking family allowances and government grants and always demanding more. "I remember as a wee girl hating Catholics," one north-Belfast woman told the author. "The grown-ups used to tell us all sorts of stories that nuns had babies to priests and the wee babies were killed and buried under the foundations of the Mater Hospital." Her husband, who went on to join the loyalist paramilitaries, "thought Catholics were zombies who couldn't think for themselves and just obeyed the priest".
The sight of Catholics prospering is profoundly unsettling to this frame of mind. "Jumped-up taigs" was how a Portadown businesswoman described a Catholic couple whom she found eating in an "expensive" Armagh restaurant, flaunting their prosperity and "dripping with Jacques Vert and gold jewellery". The belief that if Catholics prosper, they can only do so at the expense of the Protestants is a common one, even among supporters of the Good Friday Agreement.
The perception is that Catholic culture is confident and forging ahead and there is a sense in this book of Protestants feeling deracinated. Some admire so-called `'Irish culture", but are pulled back from participation by underlying prejudices. And anyway "cultural" things like drama are for "taigs and faggots ", as Protestant workingclass playwright, Gary Mitchell was told. His success and that of a growing number of Ulster Protestant writers has challenged such negativity in their community. There is bitterness among some Protestants at having been denied access to things "Irish" and a tendency to blame Catholics for having hijacked it.
Indeed, Protestant culture is quite mesmerised by Catholics and Catholicism in a way not reciprocated by Catholics. Belfast painter Dermot Seymour told Susan McKay that he thought unionism would collapse without Catholic opposition: "if `them ones' became unionist overnight, what would be left? Your culture would be destroyed because it is based on war against `them ones'. Protestants see sharing as losing. They are doomed, but it is almost as if they want to be doomed."
And so indeed it would seem. There are many examples here of Protestants wanting wanting that sense of being victims which Catholics thought peculiarly theirs. "Protestants see it all as being about losing," comments one community worker from the loyalist Rathcoole estate. "But they can't say what it is or was they are losing. In the end they say, `They won't let us down the Garvaghy Road.' And it makes me think, is that all there is?"
Northern Protestants reveals a great uncertainty about what exactly Ulster Protestant identity is. It is possible that McKay may be capturing an identity in transition, much as Fionnuala O'Connor did in her masterly study of the Catholic community from the same publisher (In Search of a State) - a book which both prefigured the present one and called for just the kind of study which Susan McKay has undertaken. At least Catholics no longer have a monopoly on whinging; nor on the repressive culture (once deemed by Protestants to be something fostered by the Catholic Church). A recurrent theme of this book is the fear of questioning and debate in unionist culture. Women know their place, treated, at best, as Stepford Wives at DUP meetings, at worst victims of wife-beating, macho and homophobic paramilitary husbands.
Though a wonderful book, it is a bleak one and I think sometimes unnecessarily so. It picks up little of the black humour and sense of the absurd shared by so many in Northern Ireland. It denounces the culture of denial and ambivalence which prevents Protestants from admitting any wrong or accepting responsibility for sectarian murders and past wrongs without always recognising that denial and ambivalence are failings common to all in Northern Ireland.
Even so, Northern Protestants is compelling reading. The Troubles may have intensified the sectarianism and polarisation of Northern society. But it also embarked that society on the kind of self-analysis which sees BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme attract daily audiences of 120,000 39 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland tuning in for a daily dose of psychotherapy. This book is an important contribution to that process. For all its bleakness, it reveals the basic goodness of so many people in what outwardly seems such a sick society. There is Simon, the border farmer, who had lost members of his own family to IRA murder gangs, yet in 1999 took his seat beside a Sinn Fein councillor. There is Diane the community worker in Derry, who, having been brought up on Protestant denial that any innocent Catholics were shot on Bloody Sunday, sought out the sister of one of the victims to listen to her story; or Ruth, the widow of a murdered UDR man in Armagh, who prayed that she could overcome her initial hatred for all Catholics and recently voted for the Belfast Agreement. I am reminded of the closing lines of Mary Beckett's story, "A Belfast Woman" - if people torn apart by the troubles of the 1970s can share an appreciation of beautiful sunsets through the smoke, grime and bigotry of Belfast, then there's hope for us all.
Marianne Elliott, from Belfast, is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University. Her book, The Catholics of Ulster: a History, will be published in October