'You have to have a comfort zone, and the Fountain acts as that comfort zone. That is the crux.' For one Protestant working-class enclave, the best way to face the future is by copying the self-help tactics of nationalists, reports Dan Keenan from Derry, in the continuing series examining unionist attitudes in the wake of the Belfast Agreement.
If Derry was indeed where the Troubles started, then it could also be here that signposts to a new Northern Ireland are to be found.
The Fountain area, a small Protestant enclave on the overwhelmingly Catholic west bank of the Foyle, used to have 1,800 residents; now there are just 300. After the Troubles began in the late 1960s, many Fountain residents took fright and left their homes on the steep hill below the city walls.
According to Alistair Simpson, governor of the Apprentice Boys of Derry for the last eight years and himself a Fountain resident, "the RUC men were the first to start moving, and it started a trend. The majority crossed the river. At the time Protestants (in the Fountain) were worse off than the Catholics."
Of this small and encircled community's efforts to build a better future for itself, he laments: "It has taken 30 years to get our feet off the ground."
According to Mr Simpson, the short history of the Fountain since 1969 makes grim reading.
"There was a fear of Roman Catholic domination after Civil Rights. Then, in the early 1970s the poor regeneration of the area started. Maisonettes were built, and some unionist councillors called on residents to quit the west bank and move to New Buildings (a loyalist Derry suburb then being built). Political fragmentation followed, and unionists lost the city centre numerically."
Numbers continued to fall throughout the 1970s, and the area was under frequent attack by nationalist youths from nearby areas.
"Whenever anything happened," he says, "the Fountain got it."
A security wall was built, an ugly structure which served its purpose. Today there is an altogether more pleasing edifice.
He cites a lack of "real political leadership" for 20 years and claims that only in the past decade has his community got its act together.
History has proved a difficult trap for Fountain residents, and many of whom he calls the children of the Troubles are ingrained with an instinctive distrust of their fellow Derry citizens that could prove problematic.
"Among the older generation," he says, "there is no real problem of communication. But with the young there is suspicion. The Troubles created a gap."
Perhaps not surprisingly, he believes what he calls the war with the IRA has been lost "thanks to the (British) government". The propaganda war has also been lost, and there is a pressing need to reverse that, he believes.
Henry Street in the Fountain area could be anywhere in Northern Ireland. It's a tight cul-de-sac lined with terraced housing dating from 1875. The standard of maintenance varies from the recently refurbished to the painted-but-dated to the derelict.
What makes Henry Street different, according to William Temple, a well-known figure in the Fountain, is that some of these properties have been bought by Bastion, a local initiative, and brought up to standard for local people.
So far 13 houses have been bought, modernised and rented back to Fountain families who bought shares, credit-union-style, under the scheme. Their rents go to finance new purchases and renovation plans.
For Mr Temple, it's an example of a community helping itself, just as the nationalists did more than 30 years ago.
The result is a sense of rejuvenation, tidier streets and the chance for local people to remain in their own part of the city rather than give in to the temptation to leave for more modern Housing Executive developments on the east bank and further afield.
But more importantly it signifies the desire of a small and numerically threatened society to look to its own resources and to make a future for itself.
Some of those houses bear what Mr Temple calls "battle scars". The price of remaining here is ongoing vandalism and attack by outsiders. As a result, instead of glass windows some are reinforced with Perspex. Some are protected by metal grilles, and here and there is evidence of sporadic stone-throwing and graffiti.
"This house is one of ours, too," says Mr Temple outside a property in Wapping Lane. "It's a good house. But you couldn't ask anybody to come in here and get attacked. It's been attacked 20 times since the beginning of 2001."
At the bottom of the hill lie two empty redbrick buildings. Henderson's and Sinclair's were shirt factories. There are hopes that they, too, can be refurbished.
IN Ferryquay Street, leading up to the Diamond, stand reminders to the Protestant past, the Presbyterian church which once had a secure congregation and the Salvation Army building. Now the area is 25 per cent Protestant, and the shops reflect a new reality which is neither exclusively Derry nor Protestant. Chain stores are gaining at the expense of established family enterprises.
In Fountain Street there is a community hall which, although modernised, stands empty, victim of a dispute concerning the allocation of European grant aid. Until the matter is resolved, the hall will remain unused.
"There is a court ruling against the directors of the Fountain Area Partnership," explains Mr Temple, "and until that is resolved, the people are getting no funding. So the people up here have been starved of funding for two years. The young people, because they have nothing to do, have caused about £200,000 worth of damage. I can't see the logic of starving people of money and then letting them do £200,000 of damage. It doesn't make sense."
Up on the city walls, a short stroll brings one past landmarks of Derry's Protestant history. The Church of Ireland churches, St Columb's and St Augustine's, and the buildings associated with the loyal orders, the Masonic Hall and the Ulster Unionist offices.
To William Temple they represent more than history; they are a key to Protestant survival in the future.
"It's essential that we have a Protestant presence in the Fountain and that we maintain these properties and give people the confidence to come over to use them," he says. "You have to have a 'comfort zone' and the Fountain acts as that comfort zone. That is the crux. If it wasn't for these institutions, there would be no need for us to have a Protestant presence."
As we stand on the walls overlooking the Bogside, Free Derry corner and Creggan, the conversation returns to population numbers. Everything comes back to the numbers game.
"The Protestant population was 18,000 pre-1969 and now it's down to 800 on this side of the river over 30 years."
The numbers are still falling due to the ageing of those Protestants who did not leave. Like Belfast in many ways, the city which has seen so much demolition and rebuilding still accommodates older, persistent attitudes.
Falling numbers have forced change on the Fountain. Schools have given in to a type of "change-or-go" fatalism and merged. So where there were once two schools with established identities and history, now there is one.
The irony is that, to secure land for a purpose-built school, some residents were forced to move out. The new school lies within a protected zone with security fences which divide the area from the rest of the west bank.
"We've had a bad year of it," says Mr Temple. "Petrol-bombs, paint-bombs, you name it. And the situation in north Belfast hasn't helped us here".
YET despite the plentiful reminders of a painful past - much of it recent - there is hope. "We're into a different ball game now after 30 years of murder and bombings. I would be very hopeful. There are a lot of hopeful signs that people are becoming more mature and discuss in a rational way the past 30 years. There's a genuine attempt to discover the lessons of the past and move forward," Mr Temple says.
Any threat to the current hesitant progress in Derry lies in the fact that theTroubles have caused a repartition of the city, and substantial Protestant minorities have banded together in areas still dominated by Catholics.
"So if they feel they're not getting a fair crack of the whip then you're going to get civil unrest and street violence because they have the numbers now to do that," says Mr Temple. "That's where the threat could come from in the future."
The Fountain will never regain enough residents to reach a population of 700, the figure which Mr Temple sees as big enough to guarantee self-sufficiency.
"We now regard ourselves as a caretaker community for the Protestant institutions, so that the people who use these institutions can come to a safe zone. That's why the Fountain is important.
"There are signs of a genuine effort being made by all parties to come together and go forward with an integrated civic society," he says. "We may not have it in housing in the short term, but in the longer term perhaps it can be a possibility.
"I don't want to live in a ghetto, I want to live in an integrated society. That thought is permeating both sides of the community, and as long as you have that basis you can come up with a solution."