The two things that came across very clearly were one, the almost apartheid nature of society. Though people, Protestant and Catholic, lived side by side literally, there was very little contact between them. Secondly you learned very quickly from the other children at school that Catholics couldn’t get jobs in a whole range of occupations. There was no point in applying for jobs under the local authorities or within the Northern Ireland civil service for instance. Nor in a whole lot of private employments, the shipyard and the aircraft factory [Short Brothers, and Harland and Wolff in
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