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such firms as Grundig, Goodyear and Michelin, although new manufacturing capacity never matched the closure of the old firms. Another was to end the cold war between Dublin and Belfast, which had ensured that the prime ministers of Northern Ireland and the Irish taoiseach had not met since the 1920s, although there were lesser official contacts on the stands of rugby matches. O’Neill was also the first Unionist premier to visit Catholic schools or to shake hands with nuns. This was revolutionary, since one of his august predecessors had boasted that he had never knowingly employed a Roman Catholic.

In 1965 taoiseach Sean Lemass visited Northern Ireland, with O’Neill making two reverse trips. These developments appalled a thrusting evangelical preacher called Ian Paisley who shouted ‘NO MASS, LEMASS!’ Paisley was the US-educated moderator of his own Free Presbyterian Church; he became first minister of Northern Ireland in May 2007 at the age of eighty-one. A lumbering charismatic demagogue with a gift for exploiting the bad publicity of an almost entirely hostile media, Paisley articulated a beleaguered brand of Unionist sentiment no longer encompassed by the staid Unionist Party. Working-class Protestants were losing their ingrained deference to the Unionist ruling classes whom Paisley dismissed as ‘the fur-coat brigade’ living in posh suburbs or country houses.13

Paisley spoke for the inner-city Protestant working class and for Protestant farmers in the province’s rural sectarian hotspots. These people had a visceral fear of Catholicism, and specifically of the wily ways of the Roman Catholic Church, for after all, through ethnic cleansing and regulations on mixed marriages, Protestantism had been virtually extinguished in the South within living memory. It was obligatory in Eire to have Gaelic to enter state employment, even though few Protestants knew it. Catholic prohibitions on abortion and contraception also made the South seem benighted to those who saw these things as part of modernity. When northern Protestants sang ‘Our Fathers knew the Rome of old and evil is thy name’, they meant it. Protestants felt besieged, a feeling that came easily to people for whom king James Il’s siege of Londonderry was part of their historical identity. They lived in Derry City, parading around the fortified walls every August, so as to look down on the majority Catholic population in the extramural slums of the Bogside below. On vast bonfires they burned effigies of the pope; as someone said, Protestants were those who burned wood. Their basic foundation myth was that Ireland had been an undeveloped bog inhabited by feckless idiots until the forces of civilisation arrived in the North.14

In 1964 Paisley indirectly provoked the worst rioting in Northern Ireland when he insisted that an RUC that was 89 per cent Protestant enforce the 1954 Flags and Emblems Act by removing an Irish tricolour from republican headquarters in the Catholic Falls Road district of Belfast. Flying that flag, with its faux-ecumenical incorporation of an orange that Catholics insisted was yellow, was an assertion of Catholics ‘in’ Northern Ireland rather than of Catholics ‘of’ Northern Ireland.

Catholics did not fear Protestants for reasons of their religion; in their eyes the English Reformation was a theological fix-up to sanction a royal divorce. Rather they feared the prosperity and the political power of Protestants as manifested in the Stormont regime in Ulster, behind whose Unionist MPs lurked the Orange Order, and the raw bigotry that they exclusively attributed to their Protestant neighbours. This was at its most elementally abrasive in the bonfire and marching season of July and August. Youngsters spent weeks collecting wooden pallets and rubber tyres for huge fires, upon which perched effigies of the pope or nationalist MP Gerry Fitt. Orangemen thumped giant Lambeg drums to the jaunty tune of ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ as their sergeant-majors launched their staffs improbably high in the air, the ‘catch-up’ marked by a hip-shaking swagger. The piercing