Join author Susan McKay as she talks about her recent book ‘Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground’. This book is based on interviews with almost a hundred people the author interviewed in travels throughout Northern Ireland, meeting people from a Protestant background and discovering the great diversity that exists in a community that is often perceived too narrowly.

The book follows the critically acclaimed ‘Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People’, first published in 2000 and now reissued in a new edition. The original book was written when the Good Friday Agreement was new. The new book includes Brexit, the centenary of the NI state, and demographic and political changes that have rocked unionism to its foundations.

Susan McKay is an award-winning journalist, commentator and author. She was a founder of the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre and from 2009 to 2012 was CEO of the National Women’s Council of Ireland. Her writing appears in the ‘New Yorker’, the ‘New York Times’, the ‘London Review of Books’, the ‘Guardian/Observer’ and the ‘Irish Times’. She is writing a new book about borders for which she received an Arts Council NI major individual award.

This event is part of a series, Heritage from Home, ran by Libraries NI Heritage from Home will run from October 2021 to mid-March 2022. The talks have been made possible through the Shared History Fund with money from The Northern Ireland Office allocated by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

In this centenary year, the programme will focus more specifically on the social context, historical events and impact on people and institutions of the creation of Northern Ireland, but will also more generally explore how life in Northern Ireland and border areas has evolved within the last 100 years.