There are two Derrys, journalist and author Susan McKay muses as she sips on her half-pint of Guinness, the drink DUP leader Ian Paisley calls the Devil's buttermilk. On one side is the Derry of Phil Coulter, Irish dancing, traditional music and civil rights marches. And then there is the Derry she grew up in, the Derry of the Northern Irish Protestant, a people she examines, warts and all, in a fascinating new book.
McKay recalls a meeting some years ago in the Sunday Tribune newspaper where she works. Her colleagues were discussing an issue relating to her hometown. The editor at the time turned to prominent Tribune writer, Nell McCafferty, and said "Nell, you are from Derry, what do you think?" McKay remembers not having a strong enough sense that she was from the same city as McCafferty to speak up with her own view. The town Coulter loved so well was not her town, or the town of other Derry Protestants.
The search for a Protestant identity, along with a potentially dangerous desire to cling to this identity at all costs, informs much of Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People. The cover, a stark photograph by Kelvin Boyes, shows the churned up soil and discarded chip-wrappers of Drumcree in Portadown, a place McKay describes as the last bastion of No Surrender. As one contributor puts it "When Portadown is bate, we are bate".
This sense of place has huge importance in the Northern Protestant's story, she says. For the most part, the book is laid out geographically with 60 in-depth interviews that give full voice to Protestants in North Down, North Belfast, Ballymoney and Portadown. The views of writers, musicians and poets are also included.
All Protestant life is here, from the well-heeled interior designer on north Down's Gold Coast who doesn't care about the political situation as long as people spend money, to the elderly woman who says she will never set foot in the Free State.
Many of the interviewees were uncomfortable talking to McKay until they had established her credentials. "I knew what they were looking for and I told those who asked that I came from a Protestant background," says McKay. Though a non-practising Protestant, this declaration of roots proved enough to cause even the most impenetrable guards to fall. "One woman I talked to was being very polite and saying `everyone gets on here' but when she knew I was a Protestant she launched into a tirade against the Catholic community," she recalls.
This curious desire not to be overtly offensive or impolite to those of whom they are intensely critical was common. "There is a kind of good manners about it," explains McKay. "They tell you what they think you want to hear."
The book's title comes from John Robb, one of the founders of the New Ireland group; "Protestants are defensive and full of denial about their own violence. They feel increasingly demoralised and threatened. They are an unsettled people," he said.
This touched a chord with McKay who says she encountered "a lot of negativity, a lot of despair, a lot of rage" among the Protestant community in the North. The feeling is strong, she says, that the other side is much better at propaganda, and a lot of people she spoke to felt "outwitted" by Catholics. One woman, Lorraine from Portadown, spoke scathingly about the Garvaghy Road Residents' Association spokesman, Breandan Mac Cionnaith because, among other unspoken atrocities, he had the know-how to use technology to further his cause.
"There he is sitting in one of those houses in Churchill Park surrounded by phones and wires and computers and if a sparrow flew past the window, he would be on to some international observer about it. Us Prods are like big babies walking around with our nappies down to our knees beside these people," she said.
She readily agreed with McKay that there were some rough Protestants up at Drumcree, but asked: "Where would we be if it wasn't for those people?" She name-checked the notorious LVF terrorist, Billy Wright. "Some people say he was a psychopath, but he was intelligent, and at least he was our psychopath," she said.
In Rathcoole, in north Belfast, community worker Ardree Wallace talks about the mentality among Protestants that they are losing everything. "They point to a community centre in a nationalist area and they say `Look, all the amenities, everything they want'. You say to them, "Yes they got that because they sat down and applied for this grant and that grant - why don't you go for it? They say `Och, what would we want that for? What would we be doing with a big monstrosity of a building like that?' "
The relationship between ordinary Protestants and Protestant paramilitaries is shown in all its complexity. "A lot of respectable Protestants here abhor violence but when there is an atrocity they won't rush to condemn it . . . it is denial at its most extreme, it is so irrational and yet for many it is still preferable to facing the truth," she says.
This head-in-the-sand approach to the less palatable parts of Protestant culture is best illustrated in Ballymoney, a place McKay decided to focus on because "it was one of those quiet little towns where nothing ever happens". Then a policeman was kicked to death in its streets and in the summer of 1998, at the height of the Drumcree stand-off, the three Quinn children burned to death in their home as a result of an arson attack.
The Quinns were one of a few Catholic families on Ballymoney's Carnany Estate and most people agreed the attack was sectarian. But when locals talked to McKay, it was clear they resented the sectarian slur and were upset with Chrissy Quinn, the boys' mother, for leaving the town and not burying her children there.
"I couldn't believe the rage against Chrissy Quinn in the aftermath of the attack . . . there was a refusal to accept there was anything sectarian in it and because she left she was blamed for perpetrating that idea," McKay says. "The lack of humanity was appalling."
The Orange Order is unlikely to endorse the book. References are made to the KuKlux-Klan and the Serbs, the implication being that neither is far removed from extreme unionist beliefs. Billy Mitchell, a former UVF man jailed for two paramilitary murders, maintains that those who have mouthed violent rhetoric for decades have blood on their hands: "When you incite people to form armies, and then walk away, you create a monster and the monster does what it wants. Basically, I think Mary Shelley could have written Frankenstein about us," he said. Running through the book is the inescapable notion that Protestantism has been captured by bigots. Many of those McKay spoke to said they were not "staunch" Protestants - in order to indicate they were not the type of Protestants who hated Catholics.
The stories that shine through what is often a bleak portrayal are those of the ordinary people who cope with dignity and resourcefulness through often extraordinary hardship. Ruth Turkington, a woman whose husband was killed by the IRA in 1979, is typical. "I was full of anger and hatred, against all Roman Catholic people, I am ashamed to say. At that time I was working in a shop and half my customers were Catholics. Most of those people came to me and wrote to me. Praise the Lord. I never let that hatred out." She voted for the Belfast Agreement, a document she described as "the only glimmer of hope".
And Pearl, a woman who was oblivious to the fact that her husband was involved in the UDA until the organisation came around wanting to organise his funeral and she found uniforms and loyalist paraphernalia hidden in the attic, told McKay how afterwards she invited young people on the fringe of paramilitary activity to her house; "I would bake for them, I'd say to them, `I'll give you buns, not guns'."
There is humour too, in varying shades of black. We are reminded of a favourite piece of loyalist graffiti, which refers to one of the hunger strikers of the 1970s - "We'll never forget you William Sands".
Asked whether she has the support of her family she says that some of them support her, but others don't. "I've long since stopped seeking the approval of those who don't [approve] anyway," she says. Her research was done from a base in Castlerock, outside Derry, where she spent nine months. The book, (McKay's second after Sophia's Story, which details a horrific sex abuse case) has been greeted with mixed feelings within her own family.
SHE has certain reflexes that she is honest enough to admit can be traced back to her Protestant upbringing; "For example, I view every thing that Sinn Fein say with a certain amount of scepticism," she says. A strong belief in the structures of the state is another remnant. She remembers talking to another journalist about an incident and verifying her story with "the RUC told me". "Your roots are showing, dear," her colleague said.
However far removed she is from the religious tenets of her background, she says Protestants are the people she uneasily calls her own. In her book she was looking for something in her people that she could feel part of. "I don't know if I found it," she says.
She is cautiously hopeful for the future and says there is a tentative optimism in places such as Derry, where agreements have been reached in relation to Loyalist parades. People such as Inez McCormack, president of ICTU and a member of the Human Rights Commission, are offering alternative views to communities. "The challenge to Protestants who are demoralised is to recognise why relationships based on rights should make them feel bad. You don't have a right to a sense of identity which depends on dominating others," McCormack said.
"There is a lot of potential for people if Protestants can relax and realise that a lot of things they feel threatened by are not real," says McKay, taking another sip of the Devil's buttermilk in a Derry pub. One area where things are developing rapidly is within the Protestant business community - the roar of the economy in the South has made them increasingly supportive of crossBorder business; "Self-interest is breaking down a lot of barriers," she smiles.
Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People by Susan McKay, is reviewed by Marianne Elliot on the Books pages