Sir, - Ruth Dudley Edwards (June 11th) may sound convincing to people who know as little as she does about the North.
In my formative years, 10-24, I experienced the reality of Orange rule in its heyday (1922-36) as a Catholic living among Protestants in Paisleyland near Ballymena. My friends included Orangemen and B Specials. With them I swam, hiked, ruggered etc., and might have developed into a Castle Catholic if my mental age had stopped at ten.
The Northern statelet was a tyranny. It had to be. England needed that bridgehead into Ireland and, if Catholics had been treated as equal citizens, it would have disappeared. Hence the organised discrimination against Catholics, to encourage them to go elsewhere so that their numbers would, hopefully, remain constant at around a third of the population.
But Protestants have turned out to be the real victims of partition. The truth, that they were expendable pawns in an imperial game, was concealed from them by the mind-deadening thunder of the drums, by sectarian slogans directed at their fellow-victims as the enemy. Not at their real enemy, their tongue-in-cheek "leaders", in whose mouths the word democracy was an obscenity. ("Dictators rule by keeping their people insular and ignorant" - well said, Ms Edwards.)
All the rank and file of unionism got was the illusion that they were genetically superior to the Taigs, the mere Irish. To distance themselves from this unter- menschen they called themselves Ulster Scots. Are they now learning that they are, simply, Irishmen who have been fooled into rejecting their true identity?
The Irish bridgehead is no longer needed, the loyal Ulster pawns are being politely dumped. Ask the most enlightened thinkers among them, the Ervines, the McMichaels, the Hutchinsons. Yes, the Protestant paramilitaries.
The enemies of Ulster's Protestants, Ms Edwards, are not John Hume and Gerry Adams. They are their "leaders". And their apologists. - Yours, etc., Paul McNamee,
Dundrum,
Dublin 14.