The threat to Northern Ireland's future is not Mr Wilson or Mr Lynch or the IRA, or even nationalism. It comes from Protestant Ulstermen who will not allow themselves to be liberated from the delusion that every Roman. Catholic is their enemy.
Thus in 1968 wrote Jack Sayers, legendary editor of the Belfast Telegraph. How much has changed? Major, rather than Wilson is Prime Minister, Bruton, not Lynch, is Taoiseach. But what else?
This is just one of many intriguing questions thrown up for this biography of Sayers based on his editorials, broadcasts, speeches and in confidential correspondence, hitherto unpublished, most of it between himself and Connolly Gage, a former Unionist MP who left Ulster to follow a legal career in England, and was able to assess events from a more detached viewpoint.
Sayers's crusade was to save Protestant Unionism from itself to persuade Unionists that it was in the best interests of their cause (to which he subscribed unconditionally) to treat fairly all the people of Northern Ireland, including, or especially, Catholics.
In 1959 the Grand Master of the Orange Order declared no Catholic could be a member of the Party. Sayers, who had already moved the Telegraph from tunnel visioned support of Protestant Unionism to more liberal attitudes, wrote to Connolly Gag
"Those of us who have been trying to get the Unionist Party out off extreme hands have had a disastrous setback
It was a clear sign to him that Unionists had begun to dig themselves into a hole. Later they dug deeper, with flags and emblems legislation which, with Ian Paisley's help, led to the Divis Street riots siting a new university in Protestant Coleraine naming a new town Craigavon after a Prime Minister who had boasted of "a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state South of the border there was hole digging going on that depressed Sayers equally. The chief excavator was John A. Costello, who announced "Eire's intention to leave the Commonwealth" and followed with the declaration of the Republic in 1949. The Border was made permanent Sayers's cherished dream for closer ties between the two parts of Ireland, within the Commonwealth, was shattered. Sayers was a man of integrity courage and honesty, and his credentials were impeccable. The Telegraph, was unequivocally Unionist. He himself came from a Methodist, suburban, middle class background. As a child in the 1920s he had witnessed sectarian riots. As a young man in 1939 he joined the Royal Navy Voluntary Reserve, and served on Churchill's personal staff throughout the war.
Modest but perceptive linking passages move the Sayers story through Terence O'Neill's premiership. O'Neill was easily persuaded of the need to liberalise Unionism and seemed aware of the dangers of alienating Catholics. Sayers supported O'Neill staunchly, even it, at times, he thought O'Neill's liberalism superficial and ambiguous.
Events were moving rapidly too rapidly for both O'Neill and Sayers. By the 1960s the marching had begun. The spectacle of the RUC batoning civil rights marchers in Derry was followed by Burntollet.
Sayers's health was failing. The emphasis on commercialism which the Thomson organisation, its new owners, brought to the Telegraph he found hard to bear. He was under constant attack from Paisley and other extremists.
In March 1969 he retired. The following August he died of a massive heart attack. Had he known what was to happen in his beloved Ulster over the next 25 years it would have been heartbreak that killed him.
This is a knowledgeable and timely book, required reading for any who think they understand the roots of the troubles that still afflict us in this country.