The middle-classes also flock to Spain and Portugal North America and the Antipodes according

The middle-classes also flock to Spain and Portugal, North America and the Antipodes, according to Knock Travel which caters for the Cherryvalley set “There’s also a rush for cruises. People seem willing to spend more.”Graham Gudgin of the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre believes the province’s middle-class affluence has been exaggerated. Businessmen, barristers and solicitors were paying up to £90,000 for cars, changing them every three years “I sold a £25,000 model yesterday to a farmer. There’s a certain kind of affluence about, and it’s possible we’re doing better than dealers in the UK,” he said.At Holywood golf club, near Cultra, there is a five-year queue for membership (£330 a year) Three new golf courses have opened near Belfast this year Sports complexes are springing up all over the place. When his attention was drawn to loyalist graffiti on a gate pillar, he said: “That must have been put there within the last 24 hours. I despise those people as much as I despise the IRA.”Harold Gibson, salesman for a Mercedes-Benz agency, said sales of luxury vehicles are “well up”. Many residents of up-marketBelfast and its environs are civil servants on London salaries and with a lot of disposable income.Places such as Cultra were free of sectarianism, Mr McCartney said.

“It’s cuckoo – monopoly money,” said David Wilson, a surveyor with a Belfast firm of estate agents.In a city where the contented and the demented are starkly divided by geography and, often, cast of mind, Mr McCartney refers to “a paradise for unelected, faceless bureaucrats” who comprise a third of the entire labour force. Another house close by was sold in 1977 for just over £80,000 and is on sale for £425,000. The middle-class has managed to enjoy a lifestyle enviable by most standards elsewhere in the United Kingdom.Houses in Cultra sell for between £160,000 and £400,000, according to a Belfast estate agent. Another agency is advertising a four-bedroom bungalow, a few hundred yards from the Cultra yacht club, for £195,000, and a four-bedroom cottage for £250,000. Inposh areas of Belfast itself, such as Malone Road and Cherryvalley, prices have soared and soared.A house off Malone Road, sold for less than £50,000 in 1985, is now on offer for £140,000. This is on top of nearly £4bn which Westminster pours into the province annually.

“What they have gained has been largely the result of diligence and thrift, rather than the grants and subsidies from London and Brussels.”Last week, the European Union announced a £230m “ceasefire package” for Northern Ireland. It is where a large proportion of Belfast’s middle class resides,unassailed by the years of communal violence and, on the whole, profitably isolated from it.
“There are misconceptions about what the middle-class has gained from the Troubles,” Mr McCartney said. AS THE Government was preparing to receive Northern Ireland’s republican and loyalist extremists as part of the peace process last week, Robert McCartney walked his pet Alsatian in a bitterly cold wind on Cultra’s seafront, a few miles from Belfas t. Elegant in hat, overcoat and finely woven tweed trousers, he was not discomfited by the blast icing the southern shore of Belfast Lough

He is a successful QC and political commentator. Cultra, where he lives, is a Belfast suburb with well-preserved Victorian mansions, grand villas, and palm trees on every other front lawn. “We have seen Group 4, Securicor, and the professional security associations They all want proper regulation.