Ulster’s uncertain future as Northern Ireland marks centenary
Posted by Mark Cotterill on May 3, 2021 · Leave a Comment
One hundred years ago today Ireland was partitioned with six of Ulster’s nine counties becoming the new province of Northern Ireland.
While the terms “Ulster” and “Northern Ireland” are often loosely treated as synonymous, the sad truth is of course that three Ulster counties – Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan – were consigned to rule from Dublin a century ago.
Ulstermen in these three counties who remained loyal to the United Kingdom – as well as their fellow loyalists in the three other Irish provinces of Connaught, Leinster and Munster – were abandoned by the London government for whom they had fought in the Flanders mud just a few years earlier.
Nor was this a straightforward religious divide. Many Catholics across Ireland remained loyal to the Crown, a topic that will be discussed in a forthcoming H&D book review. While today’s anniversary partly represents the successful resistance by generations of Ulstermen to malign plots by 20th and 21st century liberals and trans-Atlantic “new world order” advocates, it also reminds us of that original betrayal of loyalists abandoned (often to a bloody fate) south of the border.
Ironically the centenary of Northern Ireland coincides with a political crisis in Ulster’s largest political party – the Democratic Unionist Party. Whoever becomes DUP leader will have to negotiate treacherous political waters during the Brexit transition process.
Though Boris Johnson is technically leader of the “Conservative & Unionist Party”, the latter half of his party’s name seems to have been forgotten in Westminster and Whitehall.
It will be the job of loyal Ulstermen and their friends on the mainland to remind Johnson (and if necessary his successor) that the “sovereignty” supposedly regained by Brexit is meaningless if accompanied by the betrayal of almost two million of our compatriots, and the surrender of sovereignty over more than 5,000 square miles of Northern Ireland.
We look forward to the day when the British Isles are again reunited in some form of federal structure, when England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (north and south) stand together in the common struggle for racial and cultural survival.
Northern Ireland (at the 2011 census) was 98.2% White – by far the Whitest component of the British Isles. For all its founders’ pretence of ‘nationalism’, the Irish Republic is by contrast only 92% White and getting darker every day, especially in Dublin; Wales and Scotland are roughly 96% White; and England is of course the most multi-ethnic part of the UK – roughly 85% White.
