I went to Belfast three evenings last week to catch up with all the plays in the Sean O’Casey trilogy being performed at the Lyric Theatre by the Druid Theatre company.

It was a bit of a trek, but traipsing up and down was well worth it for the superb performances of the O’Casey plays set in Dublin from 1915 to 1922.

As much as the backdrop of those troubled times in Ireland’s history, the wonderful acting powerfully portrayed the contrasting but strong characters of working-class folk in Dublin tenements.

I suppose I particularly enjoyed the first of the three, ‘The Plough and the Stars’, not least because of Hilda Fay’s performance as Bessie Burgess, the strong woman who could be belligerent and bossy but with a kind heart.

Bessie was a Protestant, who remained loyal to the British monarchy at a time of Irish rebellion, proud and protective of her son’s service in the British Army, and at one point in the play she sings ‘Rule Britannia’.

And yet, with her brogue and being an archetypal Dub in many ways, nobody could say she wasn’t Irish.

Protestant, Loyalist even, British and Irish? It was a reminder that our complex mix of identity is nothing new.

Perhaps it’s the conflict of the latter part of the last century which forced people into silos and restricted any expression of identity to the preposterous point that certain voices within political Unionism and Loyalism would speak pejoratively of anyone in the Protestant community expressing an Irish identity.

That is changing.

Indeed, the notion of Protestant Irish goes back much further than the 1920s and is explored in Claire Mitchell’s new book, ‘The Ghost Limb’, in which the young Belfast woman explores the role of Protestants in the United Irishmen and asks, “Where did the spirit of 1798 go? Did Protestants forget their history?”

Claire explains her journey in the book as: “A personal exploration of an absence in my own identity. A ghost limb. A hidden compartment that I could not quite access.”

In her book, she writes: “Northern Ireland is still a divided society. Many Northern Protestants feel British and Unionist. But some of us walk a different path.”

Indeed, the subtitle of her book is, ‘Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798’.

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event at the Feile in Belfast when Claire spoke alongside two other formidable Protestant women who had been featured in her book, the Rev. Karen Sethuraman and Linda Ervine.

All three are courageous. Karen is the only female Baptist Minister in Ireland, and according to her profile, she “feels particularly called to minister outside the Church walls, journeying with people who feel they don’t fit in Church”.

Brought up in east Belfast, she spoke about her journey which led her to join the “Ireland’s Future” organisation.

Linda feels British and Irish, and is strong enough in her own identity to have become a leading champion of the Irish language in the traditional Protestant heartland of east Belfast.

She says she’d tired of people being fed division to keep them under control, and that particular brand of Unionism doesn’t speak for her.

“They don’t,” she said. “They’re not going to put me into that anti-Irish, anti-Catholic box.”

Claire spoke about her Protestant Irish identity and said: “We have been silenced but we silenced ourselves. We’re taking our voice back.”

It was quite a remarkable event and I believe that there are many people in the Protestant community examining their own sense of identity, whether they be British, Irish, British and Irish, Northern Irish or a mixture of them all, or none.

And every one of them should be valued and respected.

Perhaps many of them are doing so privately; there’s still a fear of being “Lundied”.

I recall a couple of years ago in a column describing myself as culturally Irish and in a social media post one of my detractors suggested this was me “coming out”.

A rather strange way to describe it, but a sign that “alternative Protestants” are denigrated by those who expect them to be British.

I always like to say that, first and foremost, I’m proud to be an Enniskillen man. My background is of Scottish Presbyterian stock; as recently as the late 1800s, my great-grandfather ran a coal business in Glasgow, and it was only when his wife died that he sent his infant son, my grandfather, back to Northern Ireland to be brought up by relatives.

Perhaps it’s that Presbyterian background that gives me a sense of the dissenter or “ghost limb”, but over my lifetime my personal journey and, indeed, my circumstances which I’ll not go into in this short piece, have resulted in me feeling a strong sense of Irishness.

The academic Edna Longley remarked in 1989 that if Catholics were born Irish, Protestants had to “work their passage to Irishness”.

And it’s not just the fact that often fellow Protestants dismiss Irishness.

The divisions in society also mean that there is a misguided, even sectarian perception that the Gael is the only true Irish.

But I read a comment recently that ancient Ireland was a melting pot of Celts, Vikings, Norse, Normans, English and Scots, although the divisions of the last century in particular have divided us down an unfortunate binary line of British/Irish, Protestant/Catholic.

Look where that has led us.

Accepting today’s melting pot involves further barriers, including some attitudes from the South about the Irishness of Northerners.

Writer Andy Pollak recently said that many in the South regard the North as a “strange place”.

The writer of the brilliant ‘Derry Girls’, Lisa McGee, has been tweeting of the perception “you’re not properly Irish, you’re from the North” following the Listowel Writers Festival in County Kerry.

According to the Irish Post, when Belfast man Stephen Connolly was appointed curator of the festival, someone on the Irish Arts Council asked: “Could they not have asked anyone Irish to do it?”

Watch out, too, for the anti-Northern sentiment coming to the fore in certain sections of the media when Patrick Kielty takes over The Late, Late Show on RTE soon.

The separateness of a century of Partition means there are some challenges in overcoming the combination of a lack of knowledge of the North, and a lack of empathy for Northern Nationalism.

Furthermore, the identity picture across the island has further changed with the so-called “new communities” who have made Ireland their home.

When I go to the Aviva Stadium to watch the Irish soccer team, the fans cheer to the rafters “one of their own”, Gavin Bazuma – the goalkeeper born in Dublin to Nigerian parents.

He’s very much a high-profile example of the new Irish, but there are numerous examples at grassroots level of people from many parts of the world making a real, positive difference to society.

They’re Irish too. In a sense, a new Ireland is already here.

In the third of those O’Casey plays at the Lyric, ‘Juno and the Paycock’, the Boyle family play an old gramophone record of the song, ‘If you’re Irish, come into the parlour’.

A bit twee perhaps in this day and age, but the song includes the line, ‘Whoever you are, you’re one of us’.

It doesn’t always apply, but in today’s modern Ireland, one would like to think that diversity would be valued, and that the inclusiveness of all strands of Irish identity, and others, would be regarded positively.