It was more - red top for number 52, make sure Mrs Murphy at 16 pays you for the cream from last week. Chief among them is the implementation of the post-Brexit trade protocol, which Boris Johnson assured the DUP would only happen “over my dead body”. Never does McKay come remotely close to resorting to the kind of condescension which can often be the default setting for intellectuals – whether from the Irish Republic or from Britain – when working-class Protestants are being discussed.

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. The author has an uncanny ability to see warts and all but also describe in a human way as if you are there watching. More importantly, there seems to be a lack of willingness to compromise meaningfully with nationalists.What I mean by that is that there are vast swathes of Ulster Protestantism that have been without meaningful political representation for a long time. But as many Ulster Protestants will denounce this book as an indictment of their people,I found myself warming to many of the people in the book and found their perspective refreshing. My only beef is that she's just reporting on what people are saying without fact checking, but I suppose that's the point.

There was an initial wariness but the barriers soon came down, or as much as they could as the conflict was still ongoing. Looking for a single book to tell you what to think about the province is a fool's errand in my humble opinion - and that book, if it existed, likely wouldn’t be worth reading. That may ultimately prove untenable given the rapidly shifting demographics but, for now, it represents the kind of paradigm shift in political thinking that is needed for real progress to be made. Belfast playwright Stacey Gregg describes an emerging “fluidity of persona and identity” among her contemporaries, wryly observing that Northern Ireland “has unclenched somewhat”.

She works with NGOs, including WAVE Trauma Centre for which she has made podcasts as part of the ‘Stories from Silence’ project. This book comes almost exactly twenty years after Susan McKay’s previous opus on this subject, 2000’s “Northern Protestants: an Unsettled People”.