Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a Protestant, esp. in Northern Ireland.

1834		Tipperary Free Press 23 Aug. 3/1: Come flare-up, and flare-up, me ould Mail boy, / The Orange gang are thronging forth, / The Prods are running from the North.
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 4 Apr. 10/2: There is also a neat and appropriate text, such as ‘Deal not unjustly to thy neighbour,’ &c., engraved on every card, and great care has been taken so that no sectarian doctrine is taught by any of those texts, so that the most bigoted Papist can play a game of nap or poker with a rabid Prod. without any offence being felt by either player.
1942		E. Bowen Seven Winters 51: She spoke of ‘Prods’ (or, extreme, unctuous Protestants) with a flighty detachment that might have offended many [OED].
1955		J.P. Donleavy Ginger Man (1958) 156: You may think me only a conceited Prod but there is more to me than that.
1969		Sun. Times 21 Sept. 12: But it isn’t just the Papist agin the Prods.
1979		J. Morrow Confessions of Proinsias O’Toole 3: That’s a Prod for you: nooky over, kick her in the crotch.
1987		(con. 1920s) L. Redmond Emerald Square 86: It was jobs for the other side, the Prods, and I never met a Catholic boy, who made the clerical staff.
1994		P. Quigley Borderland 46: Prods have faces like monkey’s holes.
2002		Guardian G2 23 Sept. 3: But the Pope was more likely to become a Prod than Arthur to convert.
2009		L. McIlvanney All the Colours 104: Six Taigs and a Prod.
2012		(con. 1943) G.S. Manson Coorparoo Blues [ebook] [A] lime-filled mass grave of clerical by-blows was to be found behind the walls of a New Farm nunnery, or so the Prods would darkly claim.