As a Bolton Wanderers fan, I have to concede that Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal, are, manifestly, more successful clubs. They often play nicer football, buy better players and win more trophies.

There, that’s an honest appraisal.

None of what I’ve just written is to diminish the Trotters in my eyes. But I also walk around with them wide open. Hard, rational, facts force me to confront my side’s shortcomings. It doesn’t mean I love them any the less, but in life there is little point kidding ourselves.

Of course, no-one wants to see or hear ‘their’ side run down. Defending our sense of place and identity elicits strong defensive emotions. It’s reflexive. That’s why I understand the artist Brian John Spencer when he says he was raised to be “immensely proud” of where he came from.

In a piece for the News Letter the other day, he argued that growing up in Northern Ireland was to see people “assail” his homeland for its very being “at every turn.”

Warming to his theme, he added: “For more than a few people nothing but bad has happened since the arrival of the non-conforming Scots and English settlers, and their descendants only continued…misery.”

As Northern Ireland gears-up for its centenary in 2021, it’s important to “push back on those who repeatedly misrepresent Northern Ireland as a contrived sectarian statelet and a miserable colony.”

So far so dubious; however he tips over the edge attempting to rehabilitate James Craig’s remark about Northern Ireland being a ‘Protestant parliament and a Protestant state.’ Brian, you protest too much!

I guess he ran out of space to mention that during the Stormont years, voting rights in local elections were on the basis of ‘ratepayer suffrage’ – denying the vote to a quarter of the electorate (usually poorer Catholics).

No room, either, to mention the systematic fiddling of electoral and municipal boundaries to lock-in Unionist advantage.

Or that the composition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary was 92 per cent Protestant.

And definitely no opportunity, I guess, to point out that unemployment, poor housing and poverty disproportionately affected Catholic families.

Granted, the News Letter is more of a ‘viewspaper’ and not particularly known for cool-headed detachment. Even so, the piece was egregious: Reductive, pig-headed, unutterably clueless and plain wrong.

On any measure, Northern Ireland was created as a sectarian fief and governed as one in the most appalling way for the first fifty years of its existence. Its bleak past can’t be orange-washed away.

The demand for civil rights in the late 1960s didn’t spring out of thin air. The discrimination – in jobs and housing – was rampant, while naked sectarianism stalked the corridors of Stormont. The years of Unionist majority rule were morally and intellectually indefensible.

Not convinced? Then consider this: Every institution of the devolved Northern Irish state needed to be dismantled and completely rebuilt.

And let’s not forget who did it.

It was a Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who closed down Stormont in 1972.

A Conservative Prime Minister, in Margaret Thatcher, who signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1984, (shattering, forever, the canard the Northern Ireland was an ‘internal’ UK matter).

While it was a former Chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Patten, who scrapped the RUC in 1998.

Alex Maskey’s recent description of Northern Ireland as a “putrid little statelet” was entirely accurate. It had to be taken apart piece by piece. Catholic-Nationalists were treated as second-class citizens. Whether you’re a republican, a nationalist – or just a student if history – about that, there can be no serious dispute.

Inequality and communal hegemony were woven into Stormont’s very fabric. There was an open opportunity to behave appallingly. And behave appallingly successive unionist governments did.

It would be refreshing to hear a smart unionist retort: ‘Change the record Alex, we’ve already conceded our predecessors got it wrong years ago. We live in different times and you can’t hang the past over us now.’

Only unionist politicians have never faced up to their forebears’ shortcomings.

There have been no mea culpas down the years. No signals of regret. You will search in vain for speeches where unionist moderates repudiate their own side for its woeful misrule. Perhaps David Trimble came closest, referring to the Stormont regime as a “cold house” for Catholic-Nationalists during his (often thought-provoking) Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1998.

Cold? It was bloody Arctic mate.

Unionists don’t like being reminded of all this – and I can understand why. But all political movements modernise and grow by, at some level, denouncing their own past. The failure to do that leaves contemporary Unionism pathologically unable to stretch out the hand of, if not friendship, then even that of co-operation towards ‘the other.’

If I was advising Arlene Foster (granted, a slender prospect), I would tell her that Unionism needs to get out of this bunker, shake-off its self-pity and make a measured, persuasive argument for the constitutional status quo – or risk political oblivion in the coming decade.

I would implore her to read Peter Robinson’s DUP conference speech from 2011, in which he spelled out – in the clearest terms – that the only way of neutering the appeal of unification to Catholic-Nationalists is to make Unionism acceptable to them:

“There can be no greater guarantee of our long term security in the Union than the support of a significant part of the Catholic community. Now the conflict has ended we have a window of opportunity to reset the terms of political debate. We have the opportunity to secure our constitutional position beyond the visible horizon.”

That window has now slammed shut. Unionism has done nothing to heed Robinson’s call. As a result, things have gotten worse, evidenced by the DUP’s near-miss in last March’s Assembly elections, where Sinn Féin came within one seat and 1,100 votes of topping the poll.

As a way of redefining unionism’s relationship to nationalism, I would have urged Arlene to get herself down to Dublin for the commemorations of the 1916 Rising – which made strenuous efforts to understand the conflict from all sides.

I would press her to challenge the paleo-unionism of the Gregory Campbell tendency and offer up an Irish language act (with generous promotion of Ulster-Scots as well) as a way of showing charity, respect and a willingness to make concessions for the greater good.

Alas, there seems little prospect of Unionism either coming to terms with a warts and all account of its own past, or of ever understanding and accepting the hurt it has caused to nationalists and republicans through its various abuses of power.

And before the comments thread fills up with the usual ‘whataboutery,’ this call for self-reflection of course cuts both ways. (But in case anyone wasn’t paying attention, the Shinners didn’t run the show here for half a century).

Unionist – or nationalist – is entitled to feel pride in their traditions and identity, but blatant historical illiteracy is simply self-delusional.

Mr. Spencer’s skills as a cartoonist should not be applied to history.

Kevin Meagher is the author of ‘A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable and how it will come about’ published by Biteback