For many unionists, the South has been defined by going to Dublin along bad roads and passing through poorly developed north-city housing estates, writes Jim Cusack
The journey south from Belfast to Dublin, by train or road, still colours much of Northern unionist thinking about this State. By car, there is motorway and dual carriageway through the neat, mainly Protestant countryside of Co Down until you reach Newry and then the Border.
Impeccable, prosperous farmland and neat private housing developments pass in a blur until the Newry by-pass before you meet the increasingly undulating, gradually disintegrating single carriageway that leads to the first of the traffic jams at Dundalk. Until the recently opened stretches of much better, new motorway on the road to Dublin, there was a marked deterioration in driving conditions before you reached the capital.
The approach to the city centre from Dublin was, in the recent past, through a dull northern suburb and along Dorset Street, which has resolutely defied the economic upturn and maintained its shabbiness.
By train, the northern visitor's first impression of Dublin is the sight of the expensive quayside apartments and marina-berthed yachts in Malahide. The next view from the carriage is of the ugly 1960s public-housing projects around Coolock. Then there is another contrast as the train passes through another middle-class suburb at Clontarf before passing the rows of artisan cottages just before Connolly Station.
There are no real substantial differences between the living conditions in Northern Ireland and in the Republic but there is, on the journey between Dublin and Belfast, visual evidence of post-Partition differences. The North has British road standards and public housing which, like most other EU countries, is better than the Republic's. It reinforced unionists sense of superiority over its poorer southern neighbours.
Northern day-trippers arriving by train in Dublin walk from Amiens Street away from the IFSC along Talbot Street, once lined with huckster shops and still one of the city's secondary retail centres. Many older Northerners still take O'Connell Street to be Dublin's main retail centre. It is as significant that part of the population of this island has the same view of Dublin as the cheap weekend visitors arriving on Ryanair only without experience of St Stephen's Green, Temple Bar and the Guinness Store House.
THEN there was the sight, less common now, which many Northerners mention when they talk about visiting Dublin: of children begging on O'Connell Bridge and of the number of drug addicts on the streets. Belfast doesn't have a public heroin problem yet and the North's social services would be castigated if any child was allowed to beg. The North's middle classes - and not necessarily only the Protestant unionist middle classes - viewed the pre-Celtic Tiger South with some disdain.
Since moving to Dublin 15 years ago, and returning regularly to Belfast, there has been a change in attitude certainly among younger, professionals in the North, who have better, wider experiences of Dublin and the Republic than David Trimble and his generation. Where once they saw a Church-dominated, corrupt State, they now see the tantalising wealth of some of their middle-class counterparts.
"To be perfectly honest," a friend said, "people look south with a degree of envy now."
And the Abortion Referendum?
"Most people simply didn't understand it. There is no freely available abortion here either. I suppose we are quite close on these highly moralistic issues. . .
"People no longer see the South as Trimble described it. He was talking about the 1950s and 1960s South when there were boycotts of Protestant shops, a priest-ridden potato republic. I think we would like to be like the Republic, in the euro, getting ahead. By and large, I think we are envious.
"Maybe that's what's getting up his nose."