David Montgomery's political rallying call, "Put the Pride back in Protestant", in a News Letter editorial last Monday week created a stir. Within limits, pride in identity is normal and healthy, says Martin Manseragh.
There is pride in achievement and hardship undergone, which others may recognise and empathise with. There is also the pride which is a closed experience for others. Finally there are those aspects of a tradition which no one of normal sensitivity can take any pride in.
The most difficult thing to achieve is the appropriate balance between praise and critical analysis. Both are needed for progress. Apart from the occasional brilliant dissection, like Susan McKay's Northern Protestants, An Unsettled People, critical self-analysis is sparse within the Protestant tradition, North or South.
There is much the Protestant tradition can be proud of. Unfortunately, many unionists neither appreciate nor identify with the Protestant contribution when made to Ireland.
There is something heroic about Ulster Protestant survival. In the much-commemorated 17th century Presbyterian ministers were buffeted on all sides. The siege of Derry in 1689 was the stuff of legend. The battle of the Boyne would be perceived more benignly by others if the Treaty of Limerick had not been broken, ushering in the Penal Laws.
Augustan Ireland has a legacy in fine urban landscapes and country mansions, many of which now belong to or are open to the people. The Church of Ireland produced some remarkable churchmen, while Trinity College bought forth famous orators and writers.
Irish emigrants, mainly Protestant (or Scots-Irish), played a vital role in the creation of the United States. Ulster Protestants were the backbone of the Irish Volunteers, asserting greater independence, tolerance and commercial freedom.
The Society of the United Irishmen, founded in Belfast, initially sought parliamentary reform and religious emancipation. Enlightened Protestants had then an admirable detestation of bigotry.
Under the Union, Belfast became the industrial capital of Ireland, where trade unionism also began to develop. Ulster farmers were at the forefront of the battle for tenant rights. Northern scholars helped rediscover the Celtic past. Protestant and Catholic writers share the honours for creating a national literature with international appeal.
The intellectual contribution of Davis and the political leadership of Parnell laid foundations of a self-governing Ireland. Co-operation and self-sufficiency were preached by Sir Horace Plunkett and George Russell (AE), not just Sinn Féin.
General recognition is accorded today to the sacrifices of the Ulster and Irish Divisions in the first World War. Protestants tend to take more pride publicly in, for example, the building of the British Empire and participation in the second World War.
Pride is taken by Northern Protestants in Northern Ireland since its foundation, and the forces set up to defend it, especially the RUC. There is pride in having withstood the terrible onslaught of 25 years. There is wide identification with the welfare state. There is a pride in Britishness.
South of the Border a small minority, numbers depleted by revolution, stayed on, made the best of their situation and contributed to a State in whose achievements they also take some pride. Former Protestant institutions kept alive an independent tradition and serve the whole nation today.
Then there are those things that many would rather forget or overlook, confiscation and dispossession, monopolisation of power and wealth and arbitrary eviction.
It is difficult to take the contempt shown by some. The Rev Horatio Townsend harangued the people of Clonakilty in 1798: "Deluded but still dear countrymen, surely you are not foolish enough to think that society could exist without landlords, without magistrates, without rulers? Be persuaded that it is quite out of the sphere of country farmers and labourers to set up as politicians, reformers and landowners."
A century later, in 1893, Archbishop Plunket attacked the Second Home Rule Bill as "a revolutionary measure" and claimed that the people wanting it "do not for the most part understand what it means".
A large minority opposed it, representing "the intelligence, the education and the standing of the people of Ireland more than the majority". They were determined to oppose it to the death, and "a resistance, based upon a real grievance, is sure in the end to assert its superiority over empty claims based upon an imaginary wrong". Home Rule would never become a reality.
Can anyone be entirely proud today of the prolonged resistance, with all its consequences, to a limited form of Irish self-government within the UK as a compromise between unionism and nationalism?
A partition settlement, which cut off 430,000 Catholics in the North - and more since - from an independent Ireland and an unjust hegemony were a heavy price to exact for protecting the Protestant and British identity.
The suffering in the Troubles was great. Does that justify the hatred, too much of it Protestant, which requires Berlin-type walls to separate communities from each other? If active paramilitarism has no place in the republicanism of the future, it has no place in Protestantism either.
If the Orange Order parade was mainly pageantry, would anyone object to it? Can there be pride in that Protestantism that takes offence at manifestations of Irish identity, such as Gaelic games, even if the GAA ethos in the North could sometimes be more conciliatory?
Despite Max Weber's thesis about Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, pride in being Protestant and unionist confers few special economic advantages in Ireland today. The Northern Ireland economy will find it hard to keep up until political cohesion is established.
The Good Friday agreement is, among other things, a means by which Northern Protestants can work with the other community in the North and with the people of the rest of the island. The test of any society is its ability to integrate its people.
If one wants to put the pride back into Protestant, it needs to be done on a broad canvas.
The same holds true for others. This week the DUP's meeting with the Taoiseach and the demonstration against racism in Belfast were hopeful signs.