"Do you still maintain it was a religious conflict Jim?"
Of course it was a religious conflict - there has never been any question of this - the Protestant majority was deliberately set against the Catholic minority - the British made sure that this was written into the 1922 treaty
The original aim was to Make Ulster a protestant province of nine counties. but realising that doing so would give Catholics a majority, so they removed three of them, Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan.
The six counties were not randomly chosen, they were deliberately selected so that they would remain loyal to The Crown - a "good neighbour".
This led to a Protestant led administration deliberately created to be so by The Treaty.
Who the hell do you think you're telling what is what in Ireland - part of my own family were burned out of Derry and were forced to flee to The South.
The stated aim of the new leadership was to create a Protestant State; minimum property clauses in the voting system restricted the political rights of the poorest in the north, and, throughout the depression, there was pressure put on employers only to employ Protestants
There was deliberately instigated unrest between the two communities - rioting and burning of houses - inter-religious warfare.
This was the situation in 1935.

"Despite the display of solidarity between Protestant and Catholic workers during the hard times of unemployment and the hunger marches of 1932, religious tension still existed in the community. The scarcity of jobs and consistently high levels of unemployment made for severe frictions in North¬ern Ireland society. For the Unionist Party lead¬ership it was vital to keep the loyalty of the Protestant working classes, and Orange speeches fanned sectarian flames. Protestant employers were exhorted to take on only Protestant workers. In July 1933 the Fermanagh Times reported a speech by Basil Brooke, later to become Prime Minister in Northern Ireland, appealing to Loyalists 'wherever possible to employ good Protestant lads and lassies.' In the Londonderry Sentinel in March 1934 he said:
I recommend those people who are Loyalists not to employ Roman Catholics, 99% of whom are disloyal . . . If you don't act properly now, before we know where we are we shall find ourselves in the minority instead of the majority.
The Ulster Protestant League was formed in 1931 with one of its objectives being 'to safeguard the employment of Protestants.' It was a sectarian organisation whose virulently anti-Catholic platform frequently led to violence. In November 1933, a Catholic publican was shot dead in York Street, Belfast, the first sectarian murder since 1922. Sectarian disputes escalated through 1934 to a crescendo in the summer of 1935. A big Ulster Protestant League rally on 18 June was followed by two weeks of disorders, and led the Minister of Home Affairs to ban all parades in the city. But this would have prohibited the annual Orange parades, and the outraged Orange Order put pressure on the Government to relent. They gave in, the ban was lifted, and the parades went ahead.
Predictably, bloody scenes ensued. Shooting be¬gan in the York Street area. The Catholics claimed that the Orangemen broke out of the march and attacked Catholic homes. The Orangemen claimed that Catholics fired into the parade. Who fired the first shots is impossible to determine now, but Belfast was in an uproar, and within days serious rioting had spread from York Street and had broken out all over the city, in the Short Strand, in Sandy Row and Peter's Hill. Catholics in the shipyards were expelled from their jobs, and Catholic girls were expelled from the York Street and Crumlin Road linen mills.
The RUC could not control the situation, and British troops were called in to try to restore order. They erected metal barricades as a sort of peace line along the ends of the Catholic streets around York Street, as they were to do in 1969. Whilst trying to control a Loyalist crowd in the Docks, they shot and killed two Protestants.
The fighting continued for three weeks, although some of the barricades were not taken down for months. Eleven people were killed and nearly 600 injured. There were 133 cases of arson and 367 of malicious damage."
   
A year earlier, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland had summed up the situation there perfectly:

"I have always said that I am an Orangeman first and a member of this parliament afterwards... The Hon Member must remember that in the South they have boasted of a Catholic State...
All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State."   

Rioting and disturbances were a permanent feature of life in the Six Counties and those riots were fed by religion and based on the religious divide and the discrepancy of living standards of the two communities - the 1960/70s were a natural continuum of all this.
This didn't mean that the people of different communities didn't get on - they do anywhere i the world and whoever is in charge.
The Six County State was deliberately set up on religious grounds and those differences were deliberately used to maintain it - by Britain and by the Northern Ireland Parliament.
The National situation of Ireland had been summed up perfectly by Connolly decades earlier "There is no real difference between being exploited by an English or an Irish landlord".
What part of all this do you have problems in understanding?
Jim Carroll