The fears of many ordinary Protestants in the North at the "appeasement of the minority" were conveyed to the Secretary of State in December 1972 by leading Presbyterian churchmen.
At a meeting with William Whitelaw at Stormont Castle on December 6th, 1972, Right Rev Dr R. V. A. Lynas, the Presbyterian Moderator, warned that many people were very concerned about the security situation, the breakdown in law and order and also feared "that the new Assembly would be nothing like the old Stormont".
As a result, such people felt that this was the beginning of the end.
"If the new Assembly was to be a watered down Stormont, Dr Lynas expected there would be a violent reaction on the Protestant side and numbers of people would be willing to resort to violent means."
The Moderator said he had noticed in speaking to people throughout Northern Ireland that there was a tendency to think the minority were getting more in terms of concessions than their numbers would justify.
His colleague, Rev Dr Jack Weir, the Clerk of the General Assembly, told the Secretary of State that the Protestant community were more afraid of what they saw as "excessive appeasement" than they were about reconciliation.
Many Protestants took the view that concessions had been made exclusively by the Unionist side in Northern Ireland.
They felt that these movements had not been matched by any show of flexibility on the part of the representatives of the minority in the North.
On the "Irish dimension", Dr Weir suggested that it was important that the elected representatives of the new Northern Ireland Assembly should be able to talk on the same footing as the political representatives of the Republic.
Dr Weir added that it was vital any new structure should be acceptable to a majority and "in fact, it would probably require acceptance of the majority of the majority if it was to be workable".
The Secretary of State replied that the proposals would obviously have to be reasonable if they were to be accepted by a majority.