Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground

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Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. If you want to get a true understanding of the northern protestant psyche then I recommend reading this book.

There’s an effortless flow to the writing in the book, and I especially liked the way Susan McKay represents and moves between the individual voices. There has been little peace dividend in the working class estates or the deep rural interior of Ulster. I would be particularly interested in how liberal unionists react to this book, and the many contradictions in unionism/loyalism that it brings to light. Who knows what the future holds for them, but there are lots of people in this book for whom I wish nothing but the very best.

My response to that is: the book promises to hold up a mirror to Northern Protestants and that's exactly what it delivers.

It is unfortunate that the timing of publishing deadlines perhaps squeezed out the ability to record the train wreck of a transition in DUP leadership that was only developing at the time she was writing her epilogue, and the reimergence of the UUP as a serious and marginally progressive force, partly off the back of Robin Swann's handling of the poison chalice of Health Minister during the pandemic (and over and against his previous ineptitude as party leader and the curiously coterminous Venn diagram of Brexiters and anti-vax covid-deniers). The obvious complications around Brexit are central here, but so too are local issues like the ‘cash for ash’ scandal and the unjust treatment of NHS nurses in Northern Ireland.

When ‘bread and butter’s hard to come by every day’ then it is easy to understand how one could conclude ‘a flag is all that people really do have to cling to’ (113. There were a couple of protestant owned businesses but they were mostly concentrated at one end of the small town we were from.