Queuing for a future. Unprecedented turnout in Loyalist stronghold includes defiant female vote

Officials and RUC, veterans of many a 13-hour vigil during Northern Ireland's regular trips to the referendum or ballot box in recent times, were astonished by the volume of an early turnout that only increased throughout the day.

The semi-official term for polling was ''hectic''.

One of the three stations, at the St John's Church of Ireland on the Shore Road to Belfast, actually jumped the gun by two minutes to let the voters enter.

Amidst predictions of a record 70% turnout, the procession continued until 10 o'clock last night. Rathcoole has never seen anything like it - turnouts of as low as 50% have been witnessed in the past.

''It was a neighbourhood that has been very badly treated in the past and has suffered deprivation,'' said No campaigner Alan Campbell, sporting a jazzy Union Jack tie and handing out It's Right To Say No leaflets.

Judging from takers, his prediction of a 70% No vote among the 9000 electorate on the estate might not be wildly out. Neither would it be a huge surprise. This is a Loyalist stronghold in the North Belfast constituency.

Until the early 1970s it was a mixed community, and it boasted a claim as the largest public housing development in Europe. The population of Rathcoole reached 17,000.

Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who became a martyr of the Nationalist cause, grew up in Rathcoole. After 1972 the Catholic element moved out in droves, the victims of violence and intimidation.

This coincided with the decline of the estate. Recession hit the local factories and the big employers like Courtaulds and ICI in Carrickfergus, and Spalding and Standard Telephone in Monkstown, which had attracted the early tenants of the 1950s and 1960s to settle here in an overspill from the Shankhill and North Belfast.

The population began to dip. Housing began to fall empty and simply disintegrated. Today there are still four high rises which dominate the sprawl in its centre. They are surrounded by loops of two-storey houses, developing like an encirclement of wagons.

Much of the housing has been cleared to create open space, like the People's Park development around the Diamond shopping complex in the centre.

When Mo Mowlam visited here a fortnight ago, the authorities in Newtonabbey Borough Council struck a deal with local Loyalists.

The graffiti was cleaned up in return for space and facility for four large gables as free canvases to paint large murals of armed paramilitary figures in peephole balaclavas, daubed ''South-east Antrim UFF, Rathcoole UFF and UDA''. ''Lest we Forget'', is the memorial.

Another, opposite the Rathcoole Primary polling station, reads: ''Undefeated Still 1970-1994 Red Hand Command''.

These may be taken as recommendations of a No vote.

Yet there is a mood of mild defiance, particularly among female voters. One lady, approaching 60, thanked me for the lift from the St John's polling station up to the Diamond for her shopping, and rewarded me with an explanation for her reasons for voting Yes, so long as her name would not be printed.

''Most of the No voters here are under 30. There are a lot of thugs among them. They think they are little Al Capones. They don't want peace,'' she explained.

''But when it comes to the vote a lot more people are going for a Yes than would ever admit it openly. If they admitted voting Yes they would get their legs shot or get a hiding.''

Gillian Palmer, a member of the Women, Weans and Work group with an office in a former tenant flat above the Diamond, has a different perspective on the female defiance.

Education programmes, a growing confidence in themselves, general social change and their determination to make a vote that reflects the interests of their children, have led many women to disagree with No-voting husbands and partners. Younger women were open in creating a rift over the vote with their parents. This was a new and significant phenomenon in an area like Rathcoole, argued Ms Palmer.

''Women are determined to establish their own identity in this referendum,'' she continued.

''They are trying to make a statement for themselves. I have thought this over. I was a Yes at the beginning. Then a complete Don't Know.

''Since last week I have been a Yes. I am trying to look at the bigger picture, even if I don't really believe it will necessarily bring an immediate peace.''

At the Rathcoole Primary polling station, where Gillian was planning to return later last night after meeting with queues earlier in the morning, the Democratic Unionist Party man at the gate, Mr William De Courcy, said that he did not doubt that among politicised and feminist women there would be a Yes vote.

''But they don't represent the women of Northern Ireland. The Women's Coalition polled just about zero in the Forum election of May 1996, and they only got two seats on the aggregated

system.''

Mr De Courcy, who has lived on the Rathcoole Estate for 40 years, was convinced that younger voters were still inclined, despite the Yes campaign's rock concert gimmicks, to follow their elders in voting.

His No vote was based on a belief that the question of a United Ireland would open up a birth-rate war in which the Unionist majority would be overtaken within 15 years.

A surprising ally to the No cause is Councillor Mark Langhammer, who represents Rathcoole on the Newtonabbey Borough Council as the first Labour councillor to win an election outright since the 1960s.

His record on both protestant Rathcoole and the Catholic enclave of the neighbouring Bawnmore estate is universally acclaimed to have led to significant improvements in amenities.

His No vote is based on an analysis that the Stormont Agreement will provide for an Assembly which will institutionalise a ''bear-pit of sectarianism''.

Decisions of the Assembly will require the consent of 40% of effectively opposing sectarian blocs. ''There could hardly be a greater disincentive to the development of non-sectarian politics, and in particular of Labour politics,'' he claims.

Councillor Langhammer has made his position known, but he declined to align himself with any element of the No campaign.

''I would not like to be associated with the political scum who have been campaigning for a No vote,'' he stated.

Back down at the Rathcoole Primary polling station, as the cars rolled up and families walked along together, Alan Campbell was confident in predicting a 2:1 majority for No in Rathcoole.

Above him is the gaunt outline of Cave Hill, which provides a vantage for a view of the whole of Belfast and the Antrim coast, or a refuge for the vanquished and the defeated. The Yes campaign would be heading for the hills when the count is announced this afternoon, he suggested. David Trimble would fall far short of the 70% of the overall vote he had set as his target early in the campaign.

The answer will only be known when it is learned what way they really voted when they entered the privacy of the voting booth.