Sir, - It was surprising to see John Waters's views on Northern Ireland given space in a quality paper (Opinion, September 14th). He wrote: "The trick of unionism has been not just to present itself to the world as put-upon by republican violence, but to persuade the world that this is the primary issue of the conflict. The fact that unionism ran a quasi-fascist statelet in which Catholics were ground underfoot is usually glossed over."
It is difficult to know where to start in responding to such nonsense, but we can note that in the Waters world it is not those who use the fascist methods of violence and intimidation who are censured, but the democrats who oppose them.
The facts about the Stormont regime tell a completely different story. It is not true, for instance, that the Stormont government refused to build houses for Catholics. Far from being deprived of housing, the Catholic community was actually over-represented in public-sector housing. Moreover, the scholarly study of the American political scientist Prof Richard Rose in 1968 showed that this was not due to Catholics having lower incomes. Professor Rose's conclusion that "the greatest bias appears to favour Catholics in areas controlled by Catholic councillors" not surprisingly fails to feature in many nationalist commentaries on the period.
Nor is it remotely true, as the New Ireland Forum Report scandalously suggested, that the Stormont regime deprived Catholics of "the means of social and economic development". The Catholic community was underrepresented in employment, but exactly the same is true today both in the North and in the South, yet no one accuses Mo Mowlam or Bertie Ahern of discrimination. The causes of disadvantage are complex and imperfectly understood in societies in which each community's labour supply grows at different rates, and the task is to tackle disadvantage in all communities.
Problems did exist in a small number of local authorities in the west which used the location rather than the allocation of housing to influence outcome of local (but not other) elections, and which, on both sides, tended to favour their own community in allocating jobs. None of this remotely justified Mr Waters's lurid statements. It is interesting that Arthur Green, who drafted much of the Cameron Commission Report investigating the causes of civil rights protests in 1968, wrote this week that Lord Cameron was politically motivated and prejudiced against unionists, and that Stormont was an honest, effective and progressive administration.
Nor was Northern Ireland a police state. The Special Powers Act was rarely used, and the failure of the RUC to control rioting was due to the fact that, with only 3,000 officers, it was too small. Today's RUC under Mo Mowlam has 13,000 officers.
The importance of these issues to the current situation is that those who, like John Waters, begin from a wholly false analysis will inevitably reach wrongheaded conclusions. Some may claim that issues of equality are causes of the Northern Ireland conflict, but this is not the case now, nor has it ever been the case since all the civil rights demands were acceded to before 1970.
Any attempt to suggest they are of any relevance today is merely parroting the most absurd aspects of republican propaganda, which completely ignores the fact that unionists have had virtually no power for the last 30 years. - Yours, etc.,
John D. Taylor, Deputy Leader, Ulster Unionist Party, Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast 4.