Different Protestants

'They hate us because they can no longer use us as a threat. I'm being honest. The DUP had no trouble sitting down with UVF men when we were killing taigs and that is being blunt about it. The UUP had no problem organising the Ulster Workers' Strike with us. When we stopped, the venom was really aimed at Davey (Ervine) and Hutchie (Billy Hutchison), the ones who brokered the ceasefire, the ones providing the analysis. We've sheathed the sabre and they can't rattle it any more.

'In many ways we were the social manifestation of your bigotry'.

That is Billy Mitchell, an ex-UVF prisoner, describing the relationship between mainstream and paramilitary unionism.

I have always been sceptical about the vox-pop style of journalism. However, Susan McKay's intriguing study of Northern Irish Protestants is a vindication of the form. Her 60 interviews with a variety of Northern Protestants shows a wide range of ideas competing for influence here.

This is a community whose image to outsiders is one of dour homogeneity. It matters little whether the outsiders are Irish nationalist foes or British unionist friends. We know only what they are against. Whatever the question, we expect them to say No, and the highpoint of their culture is a marching season which meanders uneasily between Laurel and Hardy comedy and racist redneck terror. As an enemy they are a gift, as an ally they must be torture. It has long been fashionable on the left to bracket them with South African whites. Fashionable, but very misleading, and Susan McKay's book helps to remind us why.

The attitudes, fears and experiences of the Protestant community are presented in regional chapters. It is soon obvious that a powerful sense of place has shaped the precise kinds of unionism which exist in Northern Ireland. The fearsome and backward-looking loyalists of Portadown and the border areas, for example, insist that their northern kin do not understand what it is like to experience 'ethnic cleansing' in action. There are examples here of people who feel that they and their co-religionists have been gradually forced to move out of nationalist areas as part of a concerted and mostly violent campaign.

There is a good deal of exaggeration in this, and McKay gently exposes it, but there is, on the other hand, enough impressionistic evidence to suggest that it is more than paranoia. And the perception is as important, in political terms, as the reality.

The working class leaders in Belfast bring a different baggage with them, including shipyard trade unionism, memories of mistreatment by 'big house' unionism before the troubles and in some cases a leaning towards socialism. From them has come the ceasefire and the clearest and most politically confident Protestant support for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Within the geographical divisions Susan McKay brings out a wide range of social and political difference too. There are fundamentalists and liberals everywhere, and in the working class an irrepressible, albeit beleaguered, tradition of socialism. The best known of the socialists, like Ivan Cooper or Inez McCormack, were attracted during the heyday of the civil rights campaign. They rarely found comfortable homes in left nationalist politics. Cooper spent the '70s in the SDLP as an ally of what he called its 'socialist wing' with Paddy Devlin. McCormack is one of the North's best known trade unionists. Older socialists, like Sam McAughtry, are acutely aware of how the conflict of the last 30 years has marginalised independent class politics.

In leafy North Down there is a distaste for the loyalist paramilitaries and a yearning for stable bourgeois politics, and yet their MP is the militantly anti-Agreement Bob McCartney. McCartney's constituency office manager was until recently Jeffrey Dudgeon, who is Northern Ireland's most prominent out gay figure, having almost singlehandedly forced the government to extend equal rights to the province. As his boss began to work more closely with Paisley's DUP in opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, the contradictions between communal and wider politics were exposed in new and interesting ways. Paisley led the opposition to Dudgeon's efforts under the now legendary slogan 'Save Ulster from Sodomy'. Dudgeon was in his younger days sympathetic to the Northern Irish Labour Party.

This book is in no way an apology for Unionism. The writer, a journalist from a Northern Protestant background, lets the more unsavoury and irrational side of Protestant politics speak for itself, and generally no further comment is necessary. She provides careful and methodical counter-evidence to refute some of the wilder claims made against Catholics. She is very perceptive on the pervading sense of victimhood and the schizophrenic attitude to violence exhibited right across the community.

The overall impression is of a people struggling to come to terms with the world as it has changed since 1969. They are keenly aware too that their Catholic neighbours are as confident about the future as Protestants are defensive about the past. It isn't said, but the impression given is that the only viable future for this community lies in their relationship with the rest of the people in the North and, ultimately, on the island, and that the old dependence on the link with Britain serves only to postpone this.

A socialism that can make no sense of this debate can offer nothing to those working class Protestants who are beginning to rethink their relationship with their old Unionist tradition. The story of socialism in Ireland is one of failed opportunities to create cross-communal unity, and ignorance of the Irish minority has played a major part in that failure. Susan McKay's book is an antidote to that ignorance, and a thought-provoking introduction to the current complexity of Protestant identity.

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Northern Protestants, by Susan McKay