Ulster Quotes

From the anarchists of tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to the EOKA in Cyprus, from the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Directe in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction again in Germany, the Rengo Sekigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised, well-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-indulgence.

We're Irish, messed up, superstitious and unorganizable…but, by God, you don't see any poets coming out of Ulster.

The phrase "the violent bear it away" fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced "Connor"), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and "husband" of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

an English girl might well believe that time is how you spend your love.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties of Moors and Jews in Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native American and African peoples.

unter seinem Fenster Joachim selbst auf dem Perron, in braunem Ulster, ganz ohne Kopfbedeckung und so gesund aussehend wie in seinem Leben noch nicht.

Time is how you spend your love. From his poem The Last Saturday In Ulster

Me contó un montón de cosas que yo no quería oír, cosas que mi madre y mi padre nunca supieron, y que odiarían saber. Lo cabrón que era Billy con ella. Cómo en ocasiones la golpeaba, la humillaba, y la trataba en general como un trozo de mierda excepcionalmente corrompida. "¿Por qué te quedaste con él?" "Era mi chico. Siempre piensas que será diferente, que puedes hacerle cambiar, que tú puedes suponer la diferencia." Eso lo entendía, Pero es un error. Los únicos hijoputas que supusieron alguna vez una diferencia para Billy fueron los Provisionales, y ellos también eran unos cabrones. No tengo ninguna ilusión sobre ellos como luchadores de la libertad. Los muy hijoputas convirtieron a mi hermano en un montón de comida para gatos. Pero ellos sólo tiraron de la palanca. Su muerte fue concebida por esos cabrones anaranjaos que venían por aquí todos los meses de julio con sus fajines y sus flautas, llenando la estúpida cabeza de Billy con insensateces acerca de la corona y la nación y toda esa mierda. Ellos irán a casa felices por el día de hoy. Pueden contarles a todos sus colegas cómo murió asesinado por el IRA uno de la familia mientras defendía el Ulster. Eso alimentará su ira sin objeto, hará que les inviten a copas en los pubs, y consolidará su credibilidad memo-bastarda entre otros tontolabas sectarios.

The Committee found two problems: On the one hand the Government was committed against any solution which would break with the unity of the Empire. On the other, it was committed that Ulster must not be forced under the rule of an Irish parliament against its will.

Ulster Ex-Servicemen’s Association and taking a leading part in the anti-boycott campaign.’ The ESMA was the paramilitary body most associated with driving Catholics from the shipyards in 1920 and with taking various actions against the employment of Catholics throughout Belfast.

It's not race, it's religion I have a problem with. Doesn't matter if it's Ulster Protestants, Liverpool Catholics or Bradfield Muslims. I hate loudmouthed clerics who play the bigot card every time anyone says no to them. They create a climate of censorship and fear and I despise them for it.

The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for “talk,” meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

You can't reveal to me that you're Folk---it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn't that it? I've heard of that---yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn't it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle?* * There are, in fact, several stories from France and the British Isles which describe this sort of enchantment. In two of the Irish tales, which may have the same root story, a mortal maiden figures out that her suitor is an exile of the courtly fae after he inadvertently touches her crucifix and burns himself (the Folk in Irish stories are often burning themselves on crucifixes, for some reason). She announces it aloud, which breaks the enchantment and allows him henceforth to reveal his faerie nature to whomever he chooses.

I don’t seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of atheists and agnostics in the six counties of Northern Ireland, even though Ulster as well as Ireland has been divided. Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. There’s an old argument about whether full bellies or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt: it’s an argument not worth having. The crucial organ is the mind, not the gut. People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

The Name "Arthur" The etymology of the Welsh name Arthur is uncertain, though most scholars favour either a derivation from the Roman gens name Artorius (ultimately of Messapic or Etruscan origin), or a native Brittonic compound based on the root *arto- "bear" (which became arth in Medieval and Modern Welsh). Similar "bear" names appear throughout the Celtic-speaking world. Gildas does not give the name Arthur but he does mention a British king Cuneglasus who had been "charioteer to the bear". Those that favor a mythological origin for Arthur point out that a Gaulish bear goddess Artio is attested, but as yet no certain examples of Celtic male bear gods have been detected. John Morris argues that the appearance of the name Arthur, as applied to the Scottish, Welsh and Pennine "Arthurs", and the lack of the name at any time earlier, suggests that in the early 6th century the name became popular amongst the indigenous British for a short time. He proposes that all of these occurrences were due to the importance of another Arthur, who may have ruled temporarily as Emperor of Britain. He suggests on the basis of archaeology that a period of Saxon advance was halted and turned back, before resuming again in the 570s. Morris also suggests that the Roman Camulodunum, modern Colchester, and capital of the Roman province of Britannia, is the origin of the name "Camelot". The name Artúr is frequently attested in southern Scotland and northern England in the 7th and 8th centuries. For example, Artúr mac Conaing, who may have been named after his uncle Artúr mac Áedáin. Artúr son of Bicoir Britone, was another 'Arthur' reported in this period, who slew Morgan mac Fiachna of Ulster in 620/625 in Kintyre. A man named Feradach, apparently the grandson of an 'Artuir', was a signatory at the synod that enacted the Law of Adomnan in 697. Arthur ap Pedr was a prince in Dyfed, born around 570–580. Given the popularity of this name at the time, it is likely that others were named for a figure who was already established in folklore by that time.

Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.

Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, in the last years of the eighteenth century, Sojourner Truth escaped from bondage and became a stirring advocate for abolition and for the rights of women. Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

He was wearing a coat made from a thick gray material called Ulster. Ulster is always gray. I’m thinking, sex killers always wear windbreakers.

The complicated formula that allowed these purchases included their assistance in obtaining Con O’Neill’s pardon, his release from prison, and, oddly, a knighthood for O’Neill balanced by a pledge from the two lairds to King James that the land would be “planted with British Protestants.” 6 Almost immediately, Montgomery and Hamilton began arranging the migration of large numbers of lowland Scots into their Ulster lands.

He could not bear to look up and see the flutter of Union Jacks, and now the red and white cross of the Ulster flag with its red hand.

The first to rally were laboring-class Protestants in 1795, who sensed a creeping Catholic Emancipationism threatening their racial privileges – such as their preferential tenant status and the right to keep and bear arms.22 The surge of Protestant bigotry took organized form with the establishment of the Orange Order, following an armed clash between Protestant and Catholic tenants in County Armagh in September 1795. This event was immediately followed by a terror campaign which drove hundreds of Catholic families from their Ulster homes into stony Connaught.

On Hearing A Man Complain Of His Wife's Bad Temper Sad news tae hear that man an' wife Atween themsel's should hae sic strife; But why lay a' the blame on Bell, There's surely something in yoursel', Of which, perhaps, you're not aware, That mak's her aften flyte sae sair? Does a' your silly actions tend Her tounge an' temper to amend, When ye come in, aye looking roon Her fau'ts tae fin', ere you sit doon? If that's the method ye pursue, Tae hunt up fau'ts, you'd get anew Tae mar your peace, an' kindle strife, Had ye an angel for a wife. James Munce (1881)

Ye Micht Hae Kinder Been I wonder, John, if ye forget The lightsome days o' youth ; Nae frown was seen then on your face. Your words were love and truth. But oh ! it's sadly changed noo Frae what I once hae seen ; It grieves my heart indeed to say, Ye're no what ye hae been. My love to you is aye the same, An' shall be to the last ; 'Mid scenes like this 'twill no' be lang Till a' my cares are past. And when I'm laid aneath the clod, An' ye come hame at e'en, Remorse may force you to confess Ye micht hae kinder been. 'Mid a' the changing scenes o' life, Its trials an' its care, Without a frown I met them a'. An' tried to tak' my share. My object was to cheer you aye When ye cam' hame at e'en. But noo its hardly in my power ― Ye micht hae kinder been. Whate'er I thought wad gie offence I tried aye to remove ; To me the hardest task seemed light When tempered doun wi' love. Your failings frae the world were hid― I tried them a' to screen ; Nae wonder, noo, I often think, Ye micht hae kinder been. James Munce (1881)

Scots can be understood by English speakers because Scots and modern English share the same "Old English" ancestor. They developed separately but are sister languages in the same way as Danish & Norweigian, Spanish & Portuguese and Czech & Slovak, all of whom can understand one another. They are more or less mutually intelligible but still unquestionably languages in their own right. As the Scottish poet, Norman McCaig (1910-1996) said, "It's as absurd to call Scots a dialect of English as it is to call English a dialect of Scots.

I seriously wondered, for example, whether Lisa McElhaney had ever been to Leningrad, or Ulster, or North Waghi. Then again, I couldn’t even figure out what she really died of. Her seventeen-year-old body was found in a plastic bag in Columbus, Ohio, in April 1987. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother had tried to get an abortion when pregnant with Lisa, but couldn’t afford it. Lisa was raped as a child, became pregnant and miscarried at age fifteen, was thrown out by her family, became addicted to drugs, and worked in pornography and prostitution to support her habit. Each time she ran afoul of the law and was incarcerated in a home for delinquents, social workers noted on her file that she displayed an eagerness for relationships and was “‘starved for affection.”’ But the system was set up to rehabilitate, not to provide relationships or affection, so Lisa withdrew and “would sit for hours and hours, staring into space.”’ When photographs of her performing sexual acts were discovered by the police, she was subpoenaed to testify in a child-pornography case against Larry Miller, the pornographer. Although Miller was a suspect in her murder, police believed the killer was a client of hers, Rob Roy Baker, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver who had been linked to similar attacks on other prostitutes. When police came to question him, Baker shot himself to death in a house filled with pictures of nude women cut from pornographic magazines. So I would ask myself, did Lisa die of assault? Which assault? The lack of affordable abortion for her mother? The beating from her john? Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation," of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body? Or a broken spirit? When she stared into space for hours was it because she knew she was in here but had no way of trying to reach anyone in the neighboring cell? Perhaps she died on unknown causes.

The passage of an Irish Home Rule Act seemed to foreshadow the break-up of the United Kingdom. Ulster’s resistance to Irish Home Rule stimulated radical nationalism there, and many Conservatives sympathized with it.

Another reason Lewis may have backed away from his role as an apologist was an acute awareness that he had failed as an apologist towards those who were closest to him—Arthur Greeves and Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore remained hostile towards Christianity throughout her later life, and Greeves moved away from his somewhat austere Ulster Protestantism to an equally austere Unitarianism. And even Warnie regarded The Problem of Pain as apologetically unconvincing. How could Lewis maintain a profile as a public apologist with any integrity in the light of such private failures?

Lewis frequently referred to Ireland as a source of literary inspiration, noting how its landscapes were a powerful stimulus to the imagination. Lewis disliked Irish politics and was prone to imagine a pastoral Ireland composed solely of soft hills, mists, loughs, and woods. Ulster, he once confided to his diary, “is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask for no better place to live in.”[17] (In certain ways, Narnia can be seen as an imaginary and idealised Ulster, populated with creatures of Lewis’s imagination, rather than Ulstermen.)

Churchill. His epic career intersected with the Middle East at several key points (and remember that he is credited with pioneering the very term Middle East); but the most important was his role as Colonial Secretary. He was a little surprised to be offered the post, at the end of 1920; but it is easy to see why Lloyd George thought he was the right man for the job. He had shown immense energy and dynamism as Minister for Munitions—equipping Britain with the tanks, planes and other technology that helped win the war. As Secretary of State for War he had been masterly in his demobilisation strategy: quelling mutinies by ensuring that those who had served the longest were the first to be reunited with their families. He had shown his gifts of charm and persuasion in the pre-war Ulster talks—and those gifts would be needed in spades. The First World War had left some snortingly difficult problems, and especially in the Middle East. — THE POST OF Colonial Secretary might sound less grand than that of Foreign Secretary—a role still occupied by that most superior person, George Nathaniel Curzon. But that is to forget the scale of the British Empire in 1921. The First World War was not meant to be an acquisitive conflict;

When Cimbaoth died this able woman took up the reins of government herself, becoming the first Milesian queen of Ireland. But the record above all others by which this distinguished woman lives to fame. is her founding of the ancient and much-storied stronghold — named after her — of Emain Macha, which henceforth, for six hundred years, was to play a most important part in the fortunes of Uladh (Ulster) and of Ireland. Macha’s

The holding of the Feis of Tara was the occasion also for holding a great Aonach or fair. Almost all the great periodic assemblages of ancient Ireland had fairs in their train. After that of Tara the most famous of these periodic assemblies were those held at Tlachtga, Uisnech, Cruachan and Tallite — the three royal residences in those three portions of the royal domain of Meath, which had been annexed from Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster, respectively. Also the Fair of Emain Macha (in the present county of Armagh), the Fair of Colmain on the Curragh of Kildare, and the famous Fair of Carman (Wexford). As

But in the beginning of the fourth century, Ulster’s power was irrevocably broken, and by far the greater portion of her territory wrested from her — her people driven into miserably narrow bounds from which, ever after, they can hardly be said to have emerged. It was when Muiredeach Tireach, grandson of Carbri of the Liffey, was High-King of Ireland, that Ulster was despoiled and broken by his nephews, the three Collas, who, on the ruins of the old kingdom of Uladh, founded a new kingdom — of Oirgialla (Oriel) — which was henceforth for nearly a thousand years to play an important part in the history of Northern Ireland. Muiredeach’s

Those days when Conor MacNessa sat on the throne of Ulster were brilliant days in Ireland’s history. Then was the sun of glory in the zenith of Eire’s Heroic period — the period of chivalry, chiefly created by the famous Royal or Red Branch Knights of Emania. Though, two other famous bands of Irish warriors gave added lustre to the period — the Gamanraide of the West (who were Firbolgs), and the Clanna Deaghaid of Munster led by Curoi MacDaire.

Of all the great bodies of ancient Irish legendary lore, none other, with the possible exception of the Red Branch cycle, has had such developing, uplifting, and educational effect upon the Irish people, through the ages, as the wonderful body of Fenian tales — in both prose and verse, rich in quality and rich in quantity. Fionn MacCumail (Finn MacCool), leader of the Fian (Fenians), in the time of Cormac MacArt, is the great central figure of these tales. Fionn and the Fian were not figments of the ancient poets’ fancy — as think some who know of this lore only by hearsay. The man Fionn lived and died in the third century of the Christian Era. The Four Masters chronicle his death on the Boyne, under A. D. 283 — though he must have died some years earlier. Fionn’s father Cumal, was chief of the Fian, in his day; and his grandfather, Treun-Mor, chief before that. In contrast to the Red Branch which was of Ulster, the Fian was of Munster and Leinster origin.[19] Connaught with its Clan na Morna contributed largely to the body, later. It

THE BREAK OF ULSTER   Of the line of Ir, son of Milesius, to whom Ulster had been ap- portioned, that Branch called the Clan na Rory (after its great founder, Rory, who had been King of Ulster, and also High-King of Ireland) now had ruled the province for nearly 700 years, namely, for more than 300 years before the Christian Era, and more than 300 years after. And their capital city and the King’s seat had been at Emain Macha. During practically all of this time, from that fort’s first founding by Queen Macha, the Royal Court of Ulster had been a court of splendour, and ever noted as a centre of chivalry and the home of poetry. And the power, and might, and courage of Ulster had ever acted as a brake on the ambitions of their neighbouring royal depredators, and especially the royal aggressors of Connaught, who were made to fear Ulster’s name.

Bagenal stood gaping as shot whizzed by his head. It was his brother-in-law, the traitor Tyrone. And the man had spotted him as well. Fury rose in Henry Bagenal and he strode out into the field to meet the bloody Irish devil. He and Tyrone would fight hand to hand, to the death, he swore to himself. He would have his revenge for Mabel, beautiful child, lost to this wretched land.   THE BALL FROM the musket of the proud Ulster marksman found the very center of Captain Bagenal’s forehead and blew out the back of the Englishman’s skull. Hugh O’Neill saw his brother-in-law fall, and though a great, joyful cry rose in his throat he never missed a step, leading his pikemen onward. But he found himself smiling as he marched, savoring the irony of the moment, for the ball that had smashed open Henry Bagenal’s head had been molded from the melted-down lead that old Lord Burleigh had foolishly sent for the roof of Mabel O’Neill’s proper English castle.

O’Neill and his army marched south from Ulster to meet the enemy while his ally Red Hugh O’Donnell marched in from the west. But once the Irish armies were in place, O’Neill and O’Donnell began arguing as to which of them should begin the attack. This delay proved fatal as the agreed upon hour of rendezvous with the Spaniards passed, and the window of opportunity for an Irish victory slammed shut. The Battle of Kinsale lasted three months, and in the end O’Neill was unable to defeat Mountjoy’s siege lines. Finally the Spanish troops surrendered to the English and sailed home. Thousands of Irish rebels died in the fighting or, taken prisoner, were hung. Hugh O’Neill was forced to submit to the English conquerors in a series of humiliating ceremonies, first on his knees to Mountjoy, then to the Lord Deputy and the Irish Privy Council. It was only after he’d put his submission in writing, renouncing his title of “The O’Neill and his allegiance to Spain, as well as protesting loyalty to the Crown, was he told that Elizabeth had died six days before. Mountjoy had tricked him. It was said that O’Neill wept openly and copiously for both his personal defeat and the ruination of the “Irish cause.” The rebel leader retreated to Ulster, and by the good graces of the new king of England, was pardoned once again, and his lands restored to him. He took up residency in his luxurious home, but spurred by a series of dangerous events and the realization that no hope was left for a free Ireland, O’Neill and a handful of Irish overlords and their families sailed from their homeland in 1607. The tragic “Flight of the Earls” ended the most tumultuous century in Ireland’s history. Tyrone,

It is important to understand this period of Irish rebellion, not least because of the light it throws on events in Ireland ever since. England persists in occupying and claiming dominion over Irish soil, and the Catholics of Ulster continue to resist. It may seem that the policies of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth are quaint echoes of the past, but the spirit of courage and defiance that animated rebels such as Hugh O’Neill and Grace O’Malley still lives in countless Irish hearts today.

Caitlin Macguire was one of the best snipers he’d ever encountered. A veteran of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland, she’d been responsible for assassinating half a dozen IRA members before she’d turned thirty, plus one of her own men suspected of turning traitor. The Troubles might have simmered down since then, but Faulkner had found use for her. Time and again she had proven herself a ruthless and efficient killer, and she was sitting on a rooftop with a silenced sniper rifle barely two hundred yards away. ‘If I had, do you not think I’d take it?’ It took a brave man indeed to interrupt her during her work. ‘Little bastard’s dug in tight, so he is

Ulster was defended against the armies of Connaught by one man, a champion, the boy-hero, Cuchulainn. Here he is inciting himself to battle:

With the 1980s came a new harshness in British politics, which included prioritising profit over public service. The Conservatives - the very party who might have been expected to support the traditional distinctiveness of the English regions against the homogenous products of the metropolis - decided that it could raise more revenue by selling ITV franchises to the highest bidder, and could build a 'stronger' ITV by allowing one franchise holder to take over another. Soon Anglia had been swallowed up, alongside Ulster, Border, Yorkshire and the others, and ITV became a single company. Proud cities such as Leeds, Birmingham, Plymouth and Norwich lost their broadcasters: from then on decisions were taken in London, or (as the UK television market was taken over by international firms) in Los Angeles or Luxembourg.

The salmon traveled through the waters of the otherworld to Ireland, its perfect form gliding between worlds. Tuan mac Cairill came to Ireland as before the flood, retaining the memories of his centuries of dream lives as Irish totem animals. Incarnated as a salmon, he was eaten by the Queen of Ulster who became pregnant and gave birth to Tuan the human. Like the Sorcerer on the cave wall in France, he is a composite being of fin, wing, tusk, and antler. I had been a man, a stag, a boar, a bird, and now I was a fish. In all my changes I had joy and fulness of life. But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper. For on land or air there is always something hindering. The stage has legs to be tucked away for sleep, and untucked for movement; and the bird has wings that must be folded and pecked and cared for. But the fish has but one piece from his nose to his tail. He is complete, single and unencumbered.

Once the way to America had been shown by the pioneers of 1717-18, going to America became easier for later emigrants. At times the zeal for migration became almost a mania, in the unaccountable manner of fads. the movement resembled an undulant fever, reaching its climax in those years when economic conditions pressed hardest in Ulster. There were five great waves of emigration, with a lesser flow in intervening years. An analysis of the tides of 1717-18, 1725-29, 1740-41, 1754-55, and 1771-75 provides, in effect, a chart of the economic health of northern Ireland.

the population emigrated or died as a direct result of starvation or disease. Most of those affected were poor Catholic families in the south and west, and this famine left a legacy of resentment against the British government which continued to export huge quantities of food from Ireland, failing to provide sufficient food to feed those affected by the famine. The famine polarized differences in Ireland, between poor, Gaelic-speaking Catholics and more affluent English-speaking Protestant landowners across the country as well as between Ulster, the six counties in the north of Ireland which had a largely Protestant population, and the south and west which was mainly Catholic.

Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms. Streets and streets of houses with bricked up windows and broken fanlights, graffiti on gable walls, soldiers everywhere: Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, put straws in his hair and screams gibberish. Before, it had resembled the infinitely more sinister figure of the articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so; and then offers you more tea.

On the outskirts of Antrim there were alright houses where Union Jacks and Ulster flags were hanging out for the Twelfth of July, even though it was only mind June.

They were “Scotch-Irish”—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland. The borderlands—as this region was known—were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years. The people of the region were steeped in violence.

The story told here is pre-Partition and I have tried to use the terminology of the time but in such a way that it does not confuse the reader. Ulster, one of the four provinces that make up Ireland, comprises nine counties, three of which—Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan—are now part of the Republic of Ireland. At that time, however, anyone from the island of Ireland was Irish, and Ulster Protestants had no difficulty in calling Londonderry ‘Derry’, although the sensitivities over Home Rule were beginning to force changes.

One feature of the economic revival of the early seventeenth century was the rapid exploitation of the woodlands. During the Tudor period the destruction of the woods had already begun, though mainly for military reasons: they blocked the passage of the royal armies, and afforded secure fastnesses into which the more lightly-equipped Irish troops could easily retreat. It was therefore a constant policy of the government to open up passes; and during the later Elizabethan wars this was extended to a general clearance of large areas. Fynes Moryson, who travelled extensively in Ireland at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, declared that he had ‘been deceived in the common fame that all Ireland is woody’, for in the course of a journey from Armagh to Kinsale he found, except in Offaly, no woods at all, beyond ‘some low shrubby places which they call glens’. But Moryson’s description cannot be applied to the whole country. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were still extensive woodlands in Munster; the great wood of Glenconkeyne in Ulster was reckoned by Sir John Davies to be as big as the New Forest in Hampshire; and even beyond these areas, the country was at this time fairly heavily timbered. But the process of destruction was soon to be speeded up.

Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster conducted a study in which he found that despite lengthy sojourns in prison, London criminals still managed to produce more children on average than ordinary, law-abiding citizens (Lynn, 1995). Lynn calculated the increase in crime that would be expected, given the degree to which criminal behavior is a function of heredity, and estimated the increase in crime which should result (other factors being equal) by the excess fertility of criminals. His excellent book, Dysgenics (reviewed here) is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the issue of eugenics and dysgenics to date.

The rifle said more than the man. It was a short-magazine Lee-Enfield, three-oh-three caliber, and its worn brass buttplate and the scars & scratches on its woodwork spoke volumes of the century gone by. They spoke of Mons, 1914, where cries of TEN ROUNDS RAPID! convinced the German soldiers they faced machine-gun fire, and English bowmen from the time of Agincourt-- so legend has it-- appeared in the clouds to cover the retreat. They spoke of Harry and Jack on their way up to Arras, of the morning on the Somme where men of Ulster, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, all the children of the empire fixed bayonets as long as swords and went to feed the earth. They spoke of Tommies on the beach at Dunkirk, taking hopeful potshots at the Stukas, and of stopping Rommel dead at Alam Halfa. They spoke of Normandy, the sneaking gang-fights in the hedgerows, where a platoon could bleed out faster than its predecessors on the Somme. Finally, they spoke of Afghanistan, the land that swallows armies. Of ancient rifles in the hands of men as hard as mountains, glimpsed on CNN & BBC, anachronisms next to things of tin and plastic. Of weapons taken by the locals from the empire that had fought them, an inheritance of iron and gun-oil out on the Northwest Frontier. They spoke of history. The man was Russian.

I'm an Ulsterman of Planter stock. I was born on the island of Ireland, so secondly I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago, so I am British. The British archipelago are offhore islands to the continent of Europe, so I am European.

Philadelphia became the Ulster Scots’ most popular port of entry for two reasons. The first was that the Pennsylvania colony had been created with an eye toward accommodating religious freedom and thus largely welcomed the Ulster dissenters , at least initially. And the second— equally as important—was that the communities in New England and New York wanted nothing to do with them.

The blood feuds of today’s Ulster— and their legacy in the journey of America’s Scots-Irish— have their roots in a decision made in 1610 by King James I of England, who also reigned as James VI of Scotland, to form a Protestant plantation on Irish soil.

Finally, in August 1607, the cream of Ulster’s Irish aristocracy, including Hugh O’Neill himself, left Ireland for permanent exile. Other Irish were to follow these hundred or so key leaders until by 1614 “there were 300 Irish students and 3,000 Irish soldiers in Spanish territories alone.

The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague. There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50–100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England. So English supervened.

Mona sat watching them, two weird figures in the uncertain light. as they wrestled with the reluctant charcoal in the censer. Then Jelkes rose upright and whirled the thing on its yard-long clashing chains round and round his head. clouds of smoke and showers of sparks flying in every direction; his enormous shadow stretched far across the vaulting of the roof. grotesque and demoniac, the cloak of his ulster flapping like the wings of a bat. Hugh, his face invisible in the shadow of his cowl, stood silently watching him. Mona clutched the arms of her chair, her heart beating in her throat and nearly suffocating her. Jelkes and Hugh, tall men in any case, looked enormous in the uncertain light. Hugh was in very deed the renegade monk returned from the tomb; Jelkes a being of another order of creation altogether.

In desperate situations, when the normal framework of social order breaks down, ordinary people are rarely as lacking in common sense as those who govern them; the instinct for self-preservation is too strong.

Wealth comes from Middle English roots meaning “well-being” or “wellness,” a condition of happiness and good fortune closely aligned with health. It was not until the late Middle Ages that it took on its definite sense of financial or material riches. Common derives from French origins meaning “shared by all.” Because it is egalitarian, it has often been on the receiving end of aristocratic scorn: “common” is also low, unrefined, undistinguished, earthy. So Walter Raleigh, the courtier and double-fisted colonizer who planted migrants in Ulster and Virginia, defined commonwealth scornfully as a “depravation … the Government of the whole Multitude of the base and poorer Sort, without respect of the other Orders.” John Locke, by contrast, defined it as “any independent Community,” a self-governing polity that might be a monarchy, a democracy, or anything else. But there is an older sense of commonwealth that means “the general good” or the well-being of the whole community—the flourishing that is shared and open to all.

Most of the first voluntary Irish immigrants came from Ulster in the north of Ireland. These immigrants were generally, although not exclusively, Protestants. They were known as “Scotch-Irish” or “Scots Irish,