THESE lines are written with a clear view across Co Down to where, as the song has it, the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea. Television viewers might know this delightful port town from the Hope Street series, set in a fictional Ireland far from the reality.

On the southern edge of Donagadee stand two flag poles. One carries an increasingly tattered union flag, the territorial marker of loyalism and the union. The other, an equally bedraggled flag of the Israeli settler state which, no less than the butcher’s apron, tells us much of what we need to know about the loyalist mindset.

The two most unionist-minded newspapers in Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph and the Newsletter, are exemplars of well-thought-out newspaper design and serve their largely partisan readership with a mixture of news and comment perfectly tailored to what is a diminishing proportion of the population in Britain’s oldest colonial possession.