"The 'deliverer' was William, Prince of Orange, whom the bankers and Whiggish businessmen of London brought from the Netherlands, in 1688, to overthrow the Stuart aristocrats.

"Our rights arose out of conflict and by conflict they they shall be retained." 19th Century presbyterian minister

Presbyterian leader in Banner of Ulster church newspaper: "Allow them to stop our preaching in the streets and they will soon stop it in the churches." 19th Century presbyterian minister

"Of the 3 000 workmen in the Belfast shipyards at that time [1886], not more than 200 were Catholics. Most of the others were Orangemen who believed that if Ireland got Home Rule the Catholics would persecute the Protestants. This is what Randolf Churchill meant by the 'Orange Card'." Holy War p. 121.

"Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten ... do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant throughout this time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland ."

"A Protestant parliament for a Protestant people." Addressing the inaugural sitting of the NI Parliament.

"From the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from Protestant majority. Let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past. While maintaining intact our own religion let us give the same rights to the religion of our neighbours ." Relinquishing leadership of the Ulster Unionist Council, 1921

"32. Government in Northern Ireland for 50 years has been one-Party as well as single-Party-that is to say that the same Party has throughout provided a Parliamentary majority and an executive based on that majority. While comparatively rare, such long periods of power for a particular Party are by no means unique in the democratic world.  One need look no further afield than the Irish Republic where, with the exception of two limited periods of inter-Party Government (1948-51 and 195~57) Fianna Fail has been in office without interruption since 1932. Moreover it must be constantly borne in mind that this situation has arisen in Northern Ireland because the voters at successive free and fair elections have returned to power a Party pledged as its fundamental principle to maintain the constitutional link between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.  Thus the continuity in office has simply reflected the consistent democratic will of the people. " ['The future development of the parliament and government of Northern Ireland', Consultative Document]

"Under the Northern Ireland parliament with the permanent, guaranteed Unionist majority the Orange Order formed the mass-membership counterpart to the political elite, linking working-class Protestants to their social betters ."

"The unionists were largely upper-middle-class people from Malone Road and places like that who got their votes from working-class areas. So these people, whom you've never seen before in your life, come down from a big house in the Malone Road, come down with a Union Jack, playin' their tapes, and you voted for them. You don't question yourself at the time but you do it in later years - like what are you votin' for these people for? They're not from the same background I am from, and they don't give a shite about working-class people. They're just after power and wages and keepin' the system goin' ." Reflections of the Stormont parliament in Fortnight, 1994.

We can see why the middle classes were not flocking to paramilitary organisations. The state had not yet collapsed. They were far less directly affected by competition with Catholics and they were not being burnt out and shot at. Business life continued much as usual. Furthermore, even major changes to the Northern Ireland state are less of a problem for the middle classes than for the working classes or farmers. They are more cosmopolitan and draw their sense of identity far more from Britain and Europe than from Ulster. Their unionism is much more like that of Terrence O’Neill in deriving from their sense of being ‘British’ rather than from strong attachment to the land and sacred history of Ulster .

".. there was a good deal of talk by the Unionist Party of an appeal to arms. Now, to set myself right, I may say that I am most strongly Unionist in my views, but at the same time I think that putting forward the idea of appealing to force was exceedingly unwise on the part of respectable people. It was unwise to use such words as they were likely to cause the poorer classes to carry out what they only talked about and threatened." Holy War p. 172.

"This attitude [Brookeborough: "Catholics are out to destroy Ulster with all their might and power"] has changed little during fifty years of Unionist rule. In August 1961, for example, Lord Brookeborough told the Orangemen of Fivemiletown that there was room for only one political party in Northern Ireland - and that party was, of course, the Unionist Party. This was only a short time after the Grand Master of all the Orangemen had declared that on no account would the Orange Order allow Catholics to be admitted to the Unionist Party ."

"The history of riots and civil commotion in the North of Ireland, and especially in Belfast, proves .. that so long as the Protestant Unionists think they have the right to dominate and insult the Catholics there can never be lasting peace. Nor can there be true democracy while the Orange Order and the Unionist Party are organisationally integrated, as they have been since 1886. Holy War p. 199.

"Unionism is pure; with so few exceptions that they need not be mentioned, unionism is supported only by Protestants. But socialism is impure; some of ‘them’ are socialists. To promote a political position which had any support (no matter how qualified) on the Catholic side of the divide was to lay oneself open to the accusation of treason .. Socialism promoted working class solidarity, and a large part of the Belfast working class is Catholic. Anything vaguely left wing was vulnerable to conservative unionists playing the ‘red and green’ card: socialism equals nationalism. In times of relative peace and stability, such as the early 1960s, it was possible for working-class Protestants to support the left-wing unionism of the NILP, but resurgent nationalism removed that option ."

Almost all Ulster Protestants were unionists. Most were deliberately and self-consciously so, willing to go to various lengths to defend the union with Britain and to counter the threat of being forced into a united Catholic Ireland. Many were members of the Orange Order. Some working-class unionists - loyalists, as they are more often known - were willing to go further than others and believed it both necessary and right to use violence (or at least prepare to be in a position to use violence) to defeat nationalism.

Until 1969 there was very little effective opposition outside the Unionist party, but there were two internal factions which were a constant irritant: working-class populists and evangelical revivalists. The former tried to ensure that the working-class Protestant got his just deserts (that is, larger deserts than the rebels). The latter tried to ensure that the unionist leadership’s periodic invocation of religious symbolism was turned into a reality of state support for the ‘true religion’. Paisley was vocal in both groups .

"The term I use to describe the culture I grew up in is 'Ulster-British'. I do not like using the term 'Protestant' because of the sectarianism encouraged by the use of religious labels. Of the alternatives, the term 'Ulster-Scot' is not accurate, if only because it leaves out the not insignificant English settlements in Ulster and the term 'planter' is also inaccurate, for only a few of the Anglo-Scottish immigrants were actually planters and, more importantly, it omits the 'native' Irish who were and have been absorbed within the cultural community which has developed here.
The term 'Ulster-British' is to be preferred because it emphasises the point that we do not see ourselves as a self contained community unique to this little bit of narrow ground. We are part of a larger grouping. Particularly in East Ulster, in any examination of culture, identity and perception, the very strong connections with northern England and Scotland stand out. Around the Irish Sea there is a triangle consisting of Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast."

"At the end of the day, much of today's protestant Ulster is desperately searching for an identity, because it isn't really sure if it ever had one of its own. It does not know (and has not known) from one day to the other whether it is totally British, British-Irish, Ulster-Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scot, Scottish-Irish or anything else either."

The Conservative Party are hardly as impartial as they may think in matters of religion. After all, even the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland had had a Catholic member of parliament before the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain. The first Catholic Tory MP was Michael Ancram, elected in 1974 in East Lothian. And this was perhaps only acceptable given his background, being Earl of Ancram and Cambridge-educated.