When I was a boy I had a toy sash. A child's sash at any rate,

a synthetic, additive-coloured ribbon with little plastic letters - LOL (loyal orange lodge) - and a number stuck to it. I'm not sure where it came from, a gift from an uncle I think, but it sat in the chest of drawers in my bedroom for years.

Down the town there was a shop that sold Red Hand of Ulster badges and wristchains and tapes of loyalist songs and the speeches of the Reverend Ian Paisley. Every summer the huge mural of King Billy in the town centre was touched up and repainted in the run-up to July 12. Our summers were marked by Orange Parades. Many of my childhood friends played in flute bands and so practising baton-throwing in the manner of the men who would march in front of the banners and bands every July was always a popular game.

I grew up in Coleraine, in the north-west of the province, some 30 miles from Londonderry (as we always called it). Straddling the River Bann, Coleraine is a market town, a university town and, for a long time, a dormitory town for the security forces. And it has always been a Protestant town. The union jack could often be seen fluttering from lamp-posts. In some areas, particularly in the summer months, kerbstones were painted red, white and blue, and now and again you would see crudely scrawled graffiti - UVF and FTP (Ulster Volunteer Force and F**k the Pope).

And yet after I practised my baton-throwing I would go off and play with my best friends, Bernard and Michael Hunt, Catholics who lived in the next street. Children of the Troubles, we spent our summer holidays running between their backyard and my own, reading comics, playing at soldiers and arguing over which team was better, Leeds, their choice, or Spurs, mine. There were other Catholic families in the scheme, too, living next door to their Protestant neighbours. Coleraine may have been a Protestant town but it was not a sectarian town.

For those who don't know Northern Ireland there is a tendency to see the whole province in the image of Belfast, a city whose cosmopolitan present can't quite shake the queasy memories of its recent history, the constant rewind of bombing and rioting we all have in our heads from years of news bulletins, a city where peace lines, those huge walls between council estates, separate two communities uneasily at peace until something like Holy Cross ignites the greasy film of bigotry.

But Belfast is not Northern Ireland. There are huge areas in that small country where the two communities live side by side in peace. Or at least they did.

On the west bank of the River Bann in

Coleraine there are two church buildings with the same name. Close neighbours, the two

St Johns are separated by a matter of yards and a matter of religion. The one closest to the river, the St Johns of Killowen Parish, is Church of Ireland, the other, across the road and up the hill, is Roman Catholic. The two churches serve an area known as The Heights, a sprawl of council housing that climbs up Kyles Brae and spreads across the higher ground. It is a mixed estate of Catholic and Protestant families. I know it well. It is where I grew up.

On the third day of this year, in a grubby back alley separated from the Catholic St Johns by a brick wall, the first Northern Irish terrorist-related fatality of 2002 was recorded. In the shadow of the chapel William Campbell, a

19-year-old Protestant, blew himself up while carrying a pipe bomb down the alley that backed on to his home. Where he was planning to take that pipe bomb is unknown, but the likelihood is a Catholic family, perhaps in the Heights, or perhaps further afield was the target. Campbell was buried a few days later in the graveyard of the other St Johns, across the road from where he died, as helicopters buzzed overhead and army landrovers patrolled the streets.

His death was the inevitable result of an ongoing campaign of Loyalist pipe-bombing in the greater Coleraine area. Some reports have said there have been as many as 100 attacks over the last year, though the local police say that is an exaggeration. It has also been reported that

the Ulster Defence Association have claimed Campbell as a member, although again the police cannot verify this. ''He wasn't known to us previously but it would appear he got pulled into this,'' says chief superintendent Barney Fitzpatrick, district commander of the local police.

Some days after Campbell's funeral I find myself walking around the streets I knew as a child, trying to understand a contradiction. When I left Northern Ireland, nearly 20 years ago, it was still reeling from the impact of the IRA hunger strikes the year before. There would be another 12 years of awful violence before the IRA announced a ceasefire in 1994, but Coleraine itself was rarely touched. Yet now, with the IRA ceasefire well established, sectarianism seems to be on the rise in the town.

Coleraine has changed. The King Billy mural and the shop selling Red Hand medallions have, like that faintly remembered child's sash, a sash I never wore, long since disappeared. But other, more disturbing expressions of Protestant

culture have taken their place. Suddenly there are murals painted on gable ends in council estates, calling cards of the UDA and the UVF. Something has changed. It is a place much less at peace with itself.

Barney Fitzpatrick, a big bear of a man who, like almost everyone else I talk to, has a serious nicotine habit, has worked in Coleraine on and off since the mid-seventies. Originally from Belfast, he remembers coming to the town as the area's first Catholic inspector. ''Coming up here was Butlins holiday camp in comparison,'' he recalls. He arrived in 1975, just after the first of two IRA bomb attacks on the town. That one killed six people. The second, in 1992, tore up the middle of the town, but fortunately caused no casualties. Such events were rare. Having served as a policeman in Lanarkshire in the late sixties, Fitzpatrick says: ''I found more bigotry in Scotland than I ever found here.'' But after a spell in Derry and then in the traffic branch, he returned to Coleraine a year ago to find a much stronger paramilitary presence.

Fitzpatrick is reluctant to say that the pipe-bomb attacks that have blighted the town in the last 12 months can all be put down to sectarianism. In some instances, he says, they're not. Separating paramilitary activity from criminal activity can be difficult. A drug dealer is approached by paramilitaries for protection money, gives it, they come back for more, he refuses and gets a pipe bomb for his troubles. Even so, he agrees, some of the estates are under the directorship of Loyalist paramilitaries. ''These are people who you would call the

godfathers and they recruit young people to do their dirty work. These people who are

commanders I've seen swaggering about in the streets with the arse out of their trousers.''

Fitzpatrick's view is not shared by everyone. ''I would accept that there is a criminal

element,'' admits the town's SDLP mayor, John Dallat. ''Many relationships in this area are mixed. That's often seized on as a reason for saying the attacks can't be sectarian. But the reality is most of the attacks are sectarian based.''

If so, that would fit with a larger picture emerging in the province. Just a few days after Campbell's death, Coleraine academic Peter Shirlow published a survey showing sectarianism was growing rather than receding in the wake of the ceasefire. The survey concentrated on Belfast, but Shirlow says there is plenty of evidence of polarisation in Northern Ireland's satellite towns. ''The young men who are involved in the pipe-bomb attacks would say that the Catholics who have lived here for 20 or 30 years are a threat. They were never a threat before, so where in the imagination do they get the idea that they are a threat now? Coleraine doesn't have a Republican community, so the only answer I have is sectarianism.''

Sectarianism or not, there is clearly a growing disaffection for the peace process among many members of the town's Protestants. It is a disaffection readily articulated by Pauline Armitage. A former businesswoman and Ulster Defence Regiment, Greenfinch, she is a vivacious, loquacious, middle-aged woman who, not content with having fought off cancer on three separate occasions, also brought the Good Friday Agreement to the brink of collapse last autumn.

Armitage, whose business selling prams and baby clothes was blown up by the 1992 IRA bomb, was one of the two Ulster Unionists who refused to back David Trimble as he stood for re-election as First Minister when Stormont was reinstated after its last suspension. She was suspended for her troubles, but when we meet in her Coleraine constituency office, she remains adamant her decision was the right one. ''I voted no in the referendum,'' she says, recalling the original vote to accept the Good Friday Agreement. ''And as a democrat I had to accept that at that time 70 per cent of the people voted for the agreement. So I decided, right, I got elected, I'll go and try to make the best of this bad agreement and get the best deal for the unionist people. But there's no deal for us.''

The language of loyalism has always been predominantly negative and Armitage is one of the most eloquent of the current nay-sayers. Why, she asks in the wake of the disbandment of the RUC and the prisoner-release scheme, has there still been no wholesale IRA decommissioning? ''Why is the one and only open-ended thing decommissioning? It was the one thing that might have satisfied the unionist community. We're supposed to have pain and gain. Well, the unionist community has had a lot of pain but I'm still waiting for the gain.''

The gain may be that the IRA are no longer blowing up towns like Coleraine, or attacking members of the security forces. Indeed, in the last couple of years it is Loyalist paramilitaries who have been responsible for most of the acts of violence in the province. But in a way you can understand the sense of alienation Armitage represents. IRA decommissioning is proving painfully protracted and so far unconvincing affair. While millions of pounds are spent in a necessary inquiry into (and drama documentaries on) the events of Bloody Sunday, Protestants can see little evidence that the Republican movement is ready to undergo a similar bout of soul-searching over, say, Bloody Friday, which came six months after Bloody Sunday. On that day the IRA detonated 22 bombs in the heart of Belfast in the space of 75 minutes, killing nine people and injuring 130. At the same time, there is an unwillingness

to recognise that initiatives such as the release of prisoners, are across the board, not just a gain for Republicans.

Out on the road to Portrush, less than a mile from Peter Shirlow's campus office, lies Ballysally, easily the most notorious council estate in the town. Bounded in by a ring-road, it sits on the edge of the town, weighed down by reputation. Right in the middle of the estate

Alison McCloskey and Helen Powles sit in the community association building telling me how unfair that is. ''Any trouble that happens here, it's headlines,'' says Powles. ''If something happened tonight, God forbid, in Mountsandel (one of Coleraine's more desirable areas) it would be in the papers as happening in Coleraine.''

That isn't surprising given the estate's recent history. As well as a number of pipe-bomb incidents (Powles's own home was bombed), the estate became notorious in 2000 for a Loyalist feud which saw an 11-year-old girl shot in the back while watching television. As a result the name Ballysally carries a freight of unfortunate associations.

For McCloskey and Powles, however, this is where they live and they want to reclaim its image. There was, McCloskey admits, talk of changing the estate's name to give it a fresh start, but ''it's part of our identity''.

As vice-chairperson of community association McCloskey, a sweet-faced 25-year-old, is keen to improve the estate's facilities and its image. An enterprise centre is on the cards and there are plans for a chemist's and a super-

market. She also wants the press to display a more positive attitude. ''Live here for a year and you'll know it's not that bad.''

But given the estate's paramilitary murals - of an order unknown to me in my years in

Coleraine - it is a difficult task. Chief Superintendent Barney Fitzpatrick says the paramilitaries have a grip on the estates. McCloskey doesn't disagree. ''I think there is a presence, but I don't think it's a problem. We don't have a lot of problems like drugs, vandalism and stuff probably because of them.''

It may seem difficult to take the paramilitaries seriously as public-minded citizens, but McCloskey and Powles are keen to seize on the positives.''If you look closely at the murals there a form of art,'' says Powles. ''It's not just somebody that's taken a paintbrush and puttered about on a bit of wood. It came to one point that the people who were putting up the murals they are also going out and painting out graffiti.''

Outside council estates like Ballysally, signs of affluence are not difficult to find. What was the edge of the town 20 years ago is now bedecked in a ribbon of private housing, a legacy of the Thatcher era. And while prices still lag behind those on the mainland, the differential is narrowing. ''Semis in Coleraine make (pounds) 70,000, two years ago they were making (pounds) 48,000,'' claims local estate agent Mark Pollock.

Sitting in his town-centre office, Pollock

displays all the signs of a successful

businessman. He has a moneyed self-confidence, comfortable in who he is and what he does, a member of Northern Ireland's grammar school-educated middle class (we were contemporaries at school). Pollock chose to go to university in Belfast and admits he has never seriously considered leaving. Yet he is aware the town he grew up in has developed a very different atmosphere in recent years. ''I wouldn't walk through Coleraine at night, I just wouldn't do it because there is an element here that worries me. Coleraine's almost become tarred slightly. A lot of the troublemakers have been shipped into the estates here.''

There may be something comforting in this notion that the problems are caused by non-locals, but it's not one endorsed by the local police. ''There certainly have been one or two people who we would classify as unwanted,'' says Barney Fitzpatrick, ''but generally we find they stay here for a short time and move on.''

In a spare hour I drive to the coast and the town of Portstewart where my grandparents lived. Walking along the promenade, looking across to Donegal in the Republic, I get a text message. It is my service provider welcoming me to the Republic of Ireland. For many this accident of technology - the result of being in an area serviced by a transmitter located south of the border - is not too wide of the mark.

''I think there will be a united Ireland,'' Helen Powles tells me. ''It's looking bad for us,'' Alison McCloskey agrees. Pauline Armitage is even more emphatic. ''I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were in a United Ireland within five years.'' This is a remarkably gloomy prognosis, particularly given that a Sinn Fein spokesman was recently reported saying that the party was on course to see its vision of a united Ireland

fulfilled within the next 50. Still, Protestants joke about enrolling for Irish lessons - gallows humour in the face of what they see as inevitable. ''I think,'' says McCloskey, speaking of the prospect of a united Ireland, ''that there will be a bloodshed before it comes to that,'' but her words sound more sorrowful than angry. Throughout the community there's a palpable mood of resignation.

This fatalism seems perverse given that the Republican threat has never been less apparent since the sixties. With Sinn Fein in office at

Stormont, there seems little chance the IRA will revert to terrorism. Better, surely, that Martin McGuinness is working within the government system rather than outside to blow it up. ''I

suppose the murdering and bombing has stopped,'' agrees Armitage, ''but look at the price we paid. We could have had this 30 years ago if we'd been prepared to surrender what we've given up now, and our men wouldn't be lying dead.''

The back story here is that there is still a complete lack of trust in Republican motives. For too many Protestants, the peace process is a huge conspiracy to railroad the north into a united Ireland. But there is another, very different, reading. For Peter Shirlow the Good Friday Agreement was a defeat for Republicanism. ''Every 50 or 60 years Republicans fight a war they don't win and go off and create a new

middle class,'' he says. ''Look at the history of Republicanism. 1790s, mid-1800s, 1916, the

creation of Fianna Fail. They basically fight wars against what they see is the British state. They never win them. They never get what they want. They take the Michael Collins track of conceding that they can't succeed. They sign up to things they are uncomfortable with and they get on with their lives. That's the whole history of Republicanism.

''You get rid of articles two and three (of the Republic's constitution), you get Republicans signing up to an assembly based at Stormont to which they said they would never take part as recently as 1995. You get rid of Republican

violence - most Republican violence is now directed at punishment beatings and shooting drug dealers etc. Ninety per cent of the people who voted in the south of Ireland voted that Northern Ireland should exist. Now, the great mystery to me is how the majority who live in this community who are unionists cannot see that this was a political victory. How could anybody not see that they have created a political solution that might take time but will bring Republicans away from a violent past?''

It's an argument rarely advanced in unionist circles, but is none the less representative for all that. It's too easy to reduce Protestantism (and nationalism come to that) to a single voice, a single outlook, but this is of course nonsense. And just as the UUP and the DUP are at each other's throats as often as they are attacking Sinn Fein, so Protestant opinion is divided and often on class lines.

Shirlow's comments are echoed by Mark

Pollock. In his family he's seeing relationships develop between the communities. ''I see the divisions for the next few generations beginning to blur and that will be the best thing that

happened to this country,'' he says.

''I think peace will out because I think the vast majority of people in this country from whatever side of the division if you want to call it that want a peaceful solution. My worry is that there is a hardcore who have been used to power. They've earned an awful lot money without having to work. They go into the pub and sit back and

'Oh he's someone.' Unless that element can be broken or brought to the table we're always going to have a problem here. I don't think it's going to go away in five or ten years' time. Maybe in 15 or 20.''

It's a view reflected by another former schoolmate, Paul Dinsmore. In the summers of our teenage years we were ''wombles'' together, clearing litter from the beaches and roads of the council district. Paul went to university in Manchester and then bucked the trend of Protestant students who go to the mainland by not staying away. ''I suppose I came home to get married,'' he says. His wife is a Catholic and increasingly he feels that the culture he grew up in no longer applies. ''By birth I'm Northern Irish but I would equally class myself as Irish. I don't have an identity. I don't identify myself with the community of my upbringing.''

I know what he means. When I left Northern Ireland I was keen to leave my past and my Protestantism behind. Who after all would want to be associated with the antediluvian attitudes of the Orange Order or the hard-drinking, hard man culture of masculinity that pervades

loyalist thinking? It's a question that Ulster Protestants are going to have to start asking themselves.

Pauline Armitage complains that Protestants are ''very lacking in friends'' in the mainland and she's right, though there's more to that alienation than just the bad publicity arising out of such PR own goals as Holy Cross. The attitudes and ideals of Protestantism seem increasingly distant to the rest of the UK it has always said it wants to be a part of, out of step with an increasingly secular, outward-looking mainland. What does it mean to be an Ulster Protestant now? That very word unionism seems quaint and old-fashioned in the wake of devolution, while the attachment to the Queen (''my Queen'' as Armitage calls her) seems out of step with Britain's more sceptical view of royalty post-Diana. The danger is that increasingly Protestantism comes down to simply not being Catholic - with all the dread possibilities for sectarianism that entails.

Perhaps that's why so many Protestants still look to the past to define themselves. Culture and history are inevitably conflated. Pauline Armitage talks with obvious affection of her family's associations with the Orange Order. ''I have very happy memories of my father going out with the sash on. And my grandfather,'' she recalls. ''It's my culture.'' If she had her way she'd have the tourist board promote Orange parades as a tourist attraction.

But this ideology of holding the line seems increasingly untenable in the contemporary world. ''Northern Ireland is part of the global and economic system,'' Peter Shirlow points out. ''Somebody who sits in Seattle and decides to close a factory in North Belfast has as much influence upon this society as a unionist councillor. How can they not see that we live in worlds where national identity is increasingly irrelevant. It's okay people having a cultural identity but if they have a political identity which doesn't realise that these things are not as important as they used to be. Republicans have realised that. Republicans know fine rightly that you can't go round with Arran jumpers on and singing the Boys from the Old Brigade forever. That it's Chuckie Armani, putting on the

whistles and flutes and getting a bit of power.''

And in a country obsessed with symbols

perhaps that is what we should be looking out for from Ulster Protestants - the day they take off the bowler hat and put on a baseball cap. n