TO BE a Protestant nationalist in Northern Ireland is a lonely and sometimes frightening experience.
They often break with their families, live a double life between Protestant and Catholic areas, face threats of violence and leave Northern Ireland altogether. The number of anonymous interviewees in this book tells its own fearful story.
Such people are ashamed at the bigotry and sectarianism of so many of their leaders and so much of their culture. Many of them become politicised when they move to Britain and are doubly confused by the anti-Irish racism they experience there.
For many of the people interviewed by Marilyn Hyndman, left-wing politics and feminism have been their escape route. Some of the most fascinating stories are from older people who grew up before the descent into widespread violence of recent decades.
This is a Northern Ireland about which one rarely reads. The left-wing halcyon days of the 1940s, when communist candidates got nearly 6,000 votes in East Belfast and 2,500 in Banbridge; Iris Adare's Belfast of the 1950s, peopled by anarchists and trotskyists, atheists and Spanish Civil War veterans; the struggle of Jim Brown against the bosses and the Orange Order for decent working conditions and union recognition in a factory in Co Fermanagh.
Then the "Troubles" began again and the old sectarian poison quickly isolated all these who would not take tribal positions. That great communist battler, Edwina Stewart, tells of how she and her family were threatened, her daughter was kept away from other children and she was forced to leave her teaching job because of her involvement in the civil rights movement
It is striking that most of this book's radical Protestants - socialists, feminists, community activists, artists, actors and musicians - have come to the same republican conclusion that no reform of Northern Ireland is possible this side of a united Ireland. Marilyn Hyndman even manages to interview four people from perhaps the North's tiniest and most irrelevant politico-religious grouping, Protestant Sinn Feiners.
This impression of like-mindedness is reinforced by the understandable tendency of some of the contributors to reject everything in their Protestant and unionist upbringing as narrow, deadening and culturally and emotionally poverty-stricken, and to embrace Irish nationalist culture as embodying all that it lacked.
It would been more instructive if the interviewer had included more Protestant radicals who have not come to such a "united Ireland or nothing" conclusion: - people like the journalist Robin Wilson, the Labour MP Kate Hoey and the gay activist Jeff Dudgeon.
Among the younger interviewees, the most interesting contributions are those which acknowledge the complexities of Protestant identity, notably from the three Bells (no relation to my knowledge). Desmond Bell, best known for his films about the Protestant working-class, talks about "the heavy price paid by unionists in terms of dignity and self image for their loyalty to a Britain which ultimately does not want them".
Robert Bell, the writer and librarian who was last heard of somewhere between Bangkok and Sarajevo, calls himself disenfranchised, "a non-aligned socialist" with "no place to go with it".
However, for me this book's single most significant voice is that of Christine Bell, a lawyer who is still a practising Presbyterian and is therefore in touch with the North's Protestant heartland in a way the other interviewees are not. She is particularly good about the apartheid-like separation between the Northern communities - between "proper Christians" and ordinary people, as well as between Protestants and Catholics - and the centrality of church and family to so many Protestants.
She argues that the key concern should be less in finding a median way between unionism and nationalism and more in building up trust through fair and equal institutions - like a police force and a justice system - which all the North's people feel they can own. {CORRECTION} 97021700039