My view is that the Christian Church has lost all of its main battles during my lifetime and, in terms of hard-nosed belief and active participation, is now a minority pastime.

As I put it, the church is no longer in the driving seat (let alone the passenger seat) when it comes to an impact on how most of us live our lives. In the battle between religious belief and secularism the Church has lost on every front. Northern Ireland may still have more Church attendees than in other parts of the United Kingdom, but even here the figures have fallen and continue to fall.

That evening I was contacted by a PhD student who wanted to arrange an in-depth interview with me on the link between Unionism and Protestantism. Her question was a blunt one: In an era when personal religious belief is in sharp decline, were the DUP and UUP putting off potential voters by still being viewed as parties for Protestants?

As I told her at the time it was a question I had never really thought about before. Yes, I have written about the continuing downturn in the pro-Union vote and argued that the unionist parties need to find policies and strategies to increase and maximise their vote; but I have never actually set out what those policies and strategies should be.

Take the case of the so-called Garden Centre Prods. It has long been assumed that they are a section of the middle-class who opted out of politics because they were able to get on with their lives relatively untouched by the most unpleasant aspects of the Troubles.

Direct Rule wasn't all that bad for them. And the arguments in favour of local accountability didn't register with them, largely because they took a pretty dim view of the "sort of people" who represented the UUP and DUP.

Some of them were attracted by the Campaign for Equal Citizenship philosophy promoted by Robert McCartney in the decade or so that followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. But when he created the UKUP and became more parochial and small-u unionist, his followers retreated to the garden centres again.

Much the same was true for the local Conservatives. Their case for the participation of a national party in local politics was a hugely strong one and one that I endorsed at the time. The problem was that unionists had long memories and regarded the Conservatives (particularly Heath and Thatcher) with considerable suspicion.

The local Conservatives also had to wage war against their own Central Office and were never given the material or the encouragement to become key players here.

Their local supporters continue to say that a bright new world awaits us under David Cameron, but I can't help feeling that the propaganda is directed to themselves rather than the wider electorate in Northern Ireland. Anyway, their moment has past and they now count their votes in hundreds rather than thousands.


That aside, one question remains: Why did Garden Centre Prods vote in favour of the Belfast Agreement?

There is no doubt that their decision to support the Trimble line at the referendum helped to push up the pro-Agreement vote to 72 per cent and ensured that the "unionist" split was 55 per cent to 45 per cent in favour. Indeed, had they not voted, it is quite likely that Trimble would have failed to deliver a "unionist" majority on the day.

The more I think about it – and hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course – the more I'm convinced that they saw the Agreement as a way of ending both sectarianism and the sectarian nature of the local political parties. They endorsed it because they genuinely believed that it would make a positive difference to Northern Ireland in general and to local politics in particular.

The trouble is, having voted for it at the referendum they didn't come out again a few weeks later and vote for the UUP in significant enough numbers to give David Trimble a comfortable enough majority in the new Assembly. But then, as some of them would counter, the UUP, a supposedly pro-Agreement party, fielded a raft of candidates across the Province who were, at best, sceptical about party policy, and at worst, downright opposed to it.

So here we are, 10 years on, with the overall pro-Union vote continuing its downward trend and the Garden Centre Prods still opting out of active politics. But the stark fact remains that we need them and we need their votes; because if we don't get their votes we will continue to lose seats in the Assembly and in the new Super Councils. And if we don't get their active participation we won't have the raw talent we need to promote and defend the pro-Union case.

Let's not kid ourselves, while both the UUP and DUP have genuine political talent amongst their elected representatives, they don't have enough of it and the replacement pool is diminishing.

There is an overwhelmingly convincing socio-economic-political-philosophical-intellectual-historical case to be made for the Union and for the constitutional and geographical integrity of the United Kingdom. But it is a two-way process and unionists in Northern Ireland are going to have to begin to promote the case for themselves. We have to find arguments whose appeal isn't restricted to Protestants. We have to find arguments which appeal to the increasingly secular instincts of the local electorate. We have to promote policies which set Northern Ireland within the context of what is happening in the rest of the United Kingdom. We have to find policies which attract the interest and votes of those 150,000 pro-Union voters who endorsed the Belfast Agreement in the 1998 referendum because they believed that it was a vote for genuine change.

There is no reason why Christians, or Muslims, or Jews or even atheists shouldn't support the Union. There is no reason why Roman Catholics shouldn't support the Union, either.

But for so long as we continue to allow support for the Union to be regarded as a "Protestant thing", then for so long will we continue the struggle to build-up and maximise the pro-Union vote. If the Union is to survive then we have to prove that it is a Union of benefit to everyone.