THE DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, has challenged Dr Garret FitzGerald's recent conclusion that the Protestant minority in the Republic has retained the position of privilege it enjoyed in the 1920s.
Dr Paisley described as "ridiculous" Dr FitzGerald's assertion in recent articles that some Northern Protestants have a rather distorted image of the conditions of their co religionists in the Republic.
The DUP leader, in an article in the Belfast Telegraph, accuses Dr FitzGerald of quoting highly "selective figures as evidence of Protestant over representation in certain professions and the agricultural sphere.
He quotes Dr FitzGerald as writing in his biography in 1991 "If I were a Northern Protestant today, I cannot see how I could be attracted to getting involved with a State that is itself sectarian
Dr Paisley comments "A political system which in 1991 he saw as bordering on a Roman Catholic theocracy, he has now wondrously transformed into providing a paradise for privileged Protestants. Dr FitzGerald is either a very confused thinker or, like Gerry Adams, he has suddenly changed his spots to facilitate the so called peace process."
Dr Paisley quotes other figures, published by Ma gill magazine in 1989, purporting to show that the single biggest drop in Protestant numbers in the Republic occurred between 1911 and 1926, when a third of the Protestant population left the State "and the main factor in forcing them out is nowhere mentioned by Dr FitzGerald widespread intimidation and the burning of their properties".
He continues "Within three or four years in the early 1920s, 146,000 Protestants had to flee from the new Republic. Many more were murdered before they could manage to escape. As the 1920s progressed, the anti Protestant sectarianism of the new State increased."
He goes on to comment on "the Republic's infamous 1937 Constitution, personally drafted by a fanatical Roman Catholic nationalist, Eamon de Valera.
"It is a priest inspired Constitution for a priest dominated society. Its fundamentally theocratic nature, including its provision of a privileged position to the Roman Catholic Church ... contravenes the 1977 declaration by the UN Commission on Human Rights."
He describes the deletion of the "special position" provision as "a clever confidence trick in that it withdrew the former recognition of (without the granting of equality to) a limited number of other faiths."