"If you want to baste an Irishman, you can easily get an Irishman to turn the spit."

"In Culture and Anarchy Lyons identified ‘at least four’ cultural traditions in Ireland. These were the English tradition, embodied in law and administration, the Gaelic/Catholic/pastoral/rural tradition, the Anglo-Irish tradition of a colonial governing class, and the Northern Protestant. He .. could have mentioned others - based on class differences, on an east/west split, or rural/urban. And if Lyons could see ‘the collision of a variety of cultures within an island whose very smallness makes the juxtaposition potentially and often actually lethal’ how much more explosive must be the mixture when compressed and confined in the parcel bomb that is Northern Ireland."

"For most of their history, but especially since the Home Rule crisis at the start of the century, Ulster Protestants have felt threatened by Irish nationalists. The IRA campaign of the 1950s did enough to remind Protestants of their beleaguered position and to confirm the views of those loyalists who believed that one could never trust Catholics to accept the Northern Ireland state.

"Two great buildings, and their magnificence to emphasize a community's separation, St Anne's for the Protestants and St Patrick's for the Roman Catholics. Two great school complexes to hammer home a community's division, the Royal for the Protestants and the Academy for the Roman Catholics. Two main shopping streets to bring home the opposition of the cultures, Scotch Street for the Protestants and Irish Street for the Roman Catholics. Two spreading sports complexes where the people of the town were split, the rugby club to the east for the Protestants and the gaelic pitches to the west for the Roman Catholics." on division in NI (Dungannon).

"It was a separated and divided town. There were no high barriers of corrugated iron to divide off each community's ghettos. [There were] unspoken boundaries. The soldiers patrolled the streets that were set aside for Roman Catholic homes, laden with backpacks and radios sets and machine guns, marked the territory of Roman Catholics. Young men, whipping orders in the patois of the north of England, questioning and frisking kids in a tongue that was foreign and hostile to the town. The police ruled the Protestants' roads and avenues. Crisply turned out, bulged by their bullet-proof vests, powerful with their carbine rifles and sub-machine guns, ties knotted neatly under their laundered collars ... "

"Ulstermen could be the beneficiaries of a unique cultural confluence which embraces the qualities of the Irish, the Scottish, the English and the Anglo/Irish. Those who seek to describe or alter the relationship between the two islands tend to undervalue. even to ignore, the Scottish horizon, the Mull of Kintyre visible from the Glens of Antrim. Presbyterians used to row across the sea to worship in Scotland on Sundays."

"Year ago the Ulster poet …W.R. Rodgers wrote about 'the creative wave of self-consciousness which occurs wherever two racial patterns meet.' By comparison, the concepts of a purely Green Ireland and an Orange Ulster seem  impoverished, especially since you cannot have one without the other. Nearly as unattractive would be a melding in which the colours run so wetly together that they dissolve into toneless uniformity." p. 33.

"Ulster is culturally a corridor. 'The literature produced by Ulster people suggests that its inhabitants might accept this province-in-two-contexts as a cultural corridor. Unionists want to block the corridor at one end, republicans at the other. Culture, like common sense, insists it can't be done. Ulster Irishness and Ulster Britishness are bound to each other and to Ireland and to Britain. Only by promoting circulation within and through Ulster will the place ever be part of a healthy system.'" (Quoting wife in Fortnight no. 256). poet, editor, expositor of MacNeice.

"There is obviously a sense of .. a dark permanence of ancient forms. Even if the hatchet is buried, few forget where they buried it. There is also the contrary temptation to dissolve the past 'in a kind of retroactive vague commonality' (a phase of Fritz Stern in the context of German history), 'giving oneself the history that sets one free of history', as Hans Blumenberg has it, and then to indulge in facile extrapolation to a benign future."