The 'Love Ulster' campaign urges resistance against what some loyalists view as a conspiracy for a united Ireland, writes Susan McKay.

Ballymena is coming down with flags this summer. Some of the Union Jacks are as big as bedspreads. There are posters on the lamp-posts in Ahoghill advertising a band parade on Wednesday night, but Kathleen McGaughey won't be there to hear the drums. After 50 years in the village, she was forced out this summer after a series of incidents which culminated with a gang of local men, women and children gathering in her front garden. They shouted sectarian abuse, threatened to burn the house down, and thumped on Lambeg drums.

Two weeks after she was escorted out by the police, loyalists threw a petrol bomb into the home of her niece. The woman and her son were rescued from the burning house and have also left the village. Similar attacks, on homes, schools and churches, have been carried out across North Antrim.

"They've nearly all the Catholics out of Ahoghill now; they won't rest 'til they're all gone," says McGaughey.

This is the Rev Ian Paisley's Bible Belt constituency. McGaughey is scornful of Paisley's belated condemnations of the violence. She says a local DUP man told her, "there's nothing I can do about these boys, but the Lord will punish them".

The Parades Commission requested that bands taking part in Saturday night's parade through Ballymena, nine miles from Ahoghill, remain silent as they pass the All Saints Catholic Church. They did so, marching to the beat of a single drum, until they reached the other side of the road, where a crowd of supporters cheered and clapped as they launched into their favourite battle song, The Sash.

The bands included the Loyal Sons of Ulster, from Ballykeel, the Sons of Liberty from Rasharkin, the Moneydig Young Conquerors, the Cloughmills Crown Defenders, the Sons of William from Ahoghill, a DUP band from South Down, and the Major Crawford Memorial, named after the man who organised the 1914 UVF gun running. The previous weekend, bands at the Royal Black Preceptory parade played The Sash loudly while Mass was being said inside the Church. As it happens, the town's most prominent Catholic, the police ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, was reading from scriptures at the time.

The Parades Commission warned the host band for Saturday's parade, the Ballymena Protestant Boys Flute Band, to behave.

Sammy is a drummer in the band, and John plays the flute. "This is our annual parade and it stands for loyalist tradition and culture," says Sammy. "We've been parading for years. Catholics used to come out and watch us."

The flag of the South East Antrim brigade of the UDA is painted on the wall overlooking the Catholic church in Harryville, where the parade assembles. John says he doesn't condone the attacks on Catholic homes and churches. "But at the end of the day, the UDA is doing what they think is right, defending the Protestant people. Sinn Féin/IRA is brilliant at propaganda. Our side is no good at that. But sometimes maybe actions speak louder than words."

Paisley says Protestants believe that "our day has come". He says the days of "pushover unionism" are over. But, he also says Ulster is facing crisis and betrayal by the British. Last week, the Love Ulster campaign was launched, its spokesman a former DUP election candidate. Copies of its newspaper were symbolically landed at Larne, like the guns for the UVF in 1914. Loyalist paramilitary leaders were among those unloading the paper, which warns that Ulster is "at crisis point", and that a conspiracy is afoot to bring about a United Ireland. It details IRA atrocities and describes the anguish of Protestant victims. It calls on Protestants to unite and declare that "enough is enough".

Billy McCaughey is the chief steward for the Ballymena parade. He is on the local community police liaison scheme. He is from Ahoghill, and in 1977, as an RUC officer and a member of the illegal UVF, he murdered William Strathearn in the village.

McCaughey, along with three other men, called their victim, a Catholic father of seven, to the door in the middle of the night, asking him to open his shop and get them pills for a sick child.

McCaughey served 16 years of a life sentence. He says his view then was that the hands of the RUC were tied, and the paramilitaries were needed in the fight against the IRA. He worked with a notorious South Armagh UVF gang which included UDR soldiers.

McCaughey is now in the small and diminishing Progressive Unionist Party. "The analysis given by unionist leaders is defensive and negative, and that creates a lot of insecurity. If you want to be Machiavellian, you could say they did it deliberately, because an insecure people is easily led. I'll be benevolent and call it incompetence. Unionists find it difficult to articulate an acceptable outcome to the conflict."

He says Love Ulster is a throwback to the past, and that the DUP "still hankers after majority rule". On Ballymena council, it excludes nationalists, republicans and the UUP from positions of power. "If that is the heart and soul of the DUP, then powersharing is impossible," he says.

The trouble in North Antrim this summer, he believes, was exacerbated by Ian Paisley Junior's prediction that there would be violence if a Republican parade went ahead in Ballymena. "The message received by the community was - 'they want violence' - and they got it. I'm not saying that was what he wanted to happen, but he should have kept his mouth shut."

Saturday evening Mass at Harryville has been suspended during the marching season since the vicious loyalist "protest" at the church in 1996-97.

It started again last Saturday evening. Father John Burns announced that the Church of Ireland bishop, Alan Barker, would come the next day to speak in the church. (Local DUP MLA Mervyn Storey, a Free Presbyterian, says he has theological objections to the bishop's gesture.)

The ghost of "taigs out" can still be seen faintly on the wall. Father Burns praised the Protestants who came during the summer to clean up the mess from paint-bombs and graffiti. "That is loving your neighbour in action," he says. The young man who instigated the clean-up is Jeremy Gardiner, a youth pastor with the High Kirk Presbyterian Church. He says young people in Ballymena are full of fear and lack hope. "Some Protestants felt what we did was against them. But it was just an act of kindness. I don't think church and community leaders here have done enough. Sectarianism is rife. The community needs to take responsibility."

Councillor Robin Stirling of the DUP is incensed by such talk, and blames it on the nationalist "propaganda machine". "What more can we do? Do they want us to run around the town naked beating our breasts?"

As for fear: "Have I not due reason to be scared of a united Ireland?" The Irish state was corrupt and full of paedophile priests - "if I meet a crocodile in the swamp it is not cowardice to be afraid." He blames the current political deadlock on pan-nationalism. "We are being denied democracy because of the SDLP's loyalty to Sinn Féin which is inextricably linked to violence," he says. "The UUP is responsible for a lot of our problems because it negotiated the Belfast Agreement. Our hands are clean of that." The DUP was right not to share its power in the council, he insists.

However, many local Protestants seem more afraid of loyalists than of the IRA. "It is despicable what has been happening," says one businesswoman. "But you can't say anything. These are bad boys. They would turn on their own. Decent, respectable people are against these attacks but you daren't let it be known you think that way." Protestants in Ahoghill who showed solidarity with Catholic neighbours got bullets in the post.

Some Catholics in North Antrim feel the violence of this summer represents "the sting of a dying wasp", and that unionism is about to settle down to sharing the future with them. Local SDLP councillor, Declan O'Loan, is more pessimistic. The husband of the police ombudsman, O'Loan has taken much abuse for speaking out against sectarian violence. In July, the PSNI had to rescue him from a meeting of the District Policing Partnership he was chairing, after a loyalist crowd (including Billy McCaughey) arrived to disrupt the meeting.

"This period reminds me of the mid 1960s," he says. "Unionists dominated the political agenda but they weren't confident. They rejected calls for fairness then and it is the same now. Not every Protestant here is a rabid bigot, but they don't form the public voice of unionism. The DUP does. Its symbolic dominance of Ballymena council is fundamentally linked to loyalist attacks in the sense that it is saying, 'Catholics have no place here.'"