Paisleyites `don't mind decent men' but say Adams left blood behind

The sitting-room of the comfortable bungalow is absolutely neat and spotless

The sitting-room of the comfortable bungalow is absolutely neat and spotless. While the husband and his friend talk to the visitor, the quiet wife hands around a tray of tea and fine scones and shortbread.

On the wall there is a large studio portrait photograph of the grown-up children. Their father tells me of their accomplishments, which are truly remarkable. The eldest daughter has studied at some of Europe's finest universities and speaks several foreign languages.

None, perhaps, is as distinctive as the language of Ulster fundamentalism so naturally used in her home. Her father says: "When the Abyssinian came to Queen Victoria and asked her what is the secret of England's greatness, she pointed to the book open beside her. `The open Bible,' she told him."

His friend nods, in vigorous agreement. These two men are devoted followers of Dr Paisley. Their objections to the future envisaged in the Belfast Agreement are as much religious as political. Yes-voters may carry the day on Friday - "we may, because of the waywardness of our people, have to live in bondage" - but all is not lost yet. "We pray for the help of God to bring us out free from this."

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Outside is the rich and orderly farmland to which their ancestors were granted title. The pavements of the nearby village are painted red, white and blue.

"I'm British," the man of the house says. "I came into the world British. I have a certain amount of brains between these two ears, and the brains tell me that British is best."

He refers to the Republic as "your country" and amuses himself and his friend with his descriptions of it. It is "the land of the pothole", the place where the Garda and the Army have to guard cash deliveries, whereas in his town Securicor does it alone. The place where "if I wore a Union Jack in my lapel I wouldn't come out alive."

The failings of the Republic are used in an ingenious defence of Stormont's record on civil rights. "Go to Ballyfermot in the holy city of Dublin. In the Celtic Tiger. Is there poverty there? There is. Was it caused by discrimination? No."

All this and much more is delivered in great good humour. But the bottom line is that "Yogi Bear" - David Trimble - has been outwitted by Mo Mowlam and Sinn Fein, and that the Belfast Agreement will leave the people of Northern Ireland "less British and less Protestant than we are today."

If any argument about this is proffered, he simply points to his leaders. Dr Paisley's eminence goes without saying. "Mr Peter Robinson is an authority on peace." And Bob McCartney is a senior barrister who has no financial needs. "I've heard it said," my host says slowly and impressively, "that Bob McCartney is worth £1,000 a day, 200 days a year."

His friend over on the sofa, a big, open-faced farmer, gets rid of his cup and saucer. There is something he passionately wants to say, and it doesn't really have to do with political or religious argument. It is that he has seen such terrible murders, and such family and community suffering caused by them, that he cannot, and he will not, vote to set up an assembly with Sinn Fein in it.

"We don't mind decent men," he says, and his voice is shaking with earnestness. "We can work with John Hume and them ones. But we can't work with Gerry Adams because he has left blood behind in every place in this country."

The awful details of village murders begin to pour from this quiet countryman. One in particular, just down the road, keeps recurring in his conversation, as if he never stops seeing it. "The poor man was doing nobody any harm. He was just in putting a pound on a horse. All he had in the world was on his back. He was lying there in the street and he was calling, `Please help me! I'm dying. I'm dying'." He stops talking. He can't go on.

The wife has come in and handed her husband a neat book of colour photographs, and he hands them to me. What is this? A car, with two smashed holes in the windscreen, like a big eye and a little eye. The brother-in-law. Bringing home a Christmas tree with his little boy. The boy - the smaller bullet-hole - lived. The brother-in-law died, spouting blood, beside him.

Why? Because he took a part-time job in a Catholic supermarket. "We can't have it!" the man on the sofa cries out. "Sinn Fein hold murderers' hands up in victory, and innocent boys lying dead on the road!"

The biblical language takes an earthy turn. "To sit with them bastards in an assembly is too much. And Protestant boys have done the same. Them's dirty drug-dealing villains . . ." The man's heart is broken. You can see it.

"Our forefathers kept this land for 50 years and they never shot a being."

The two men go on for a while, thinking up other reasons for their No votes. That "our freedom comes from the Reformation". That they reject the "Anglo-Irish diktat". But this is really it. Their homeland has been roamed by murderers.

And they don't even care if the murderers turn towards peace once they get into an assembly. "It is not a matter of what they'll do when they get in. It's how they got in."