On the Window Ledge of the Union

Colin Kidd

  • Belfast 400: People, Place and History edited by S.J. Connolly
    Liverpool, 392 pp, £14.95, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84631 634 0
  • BuyUlster since 1600: Politics, Economy and Society edited by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw
    Oxford, 355 pp, £35.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 958311 9
  • The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú
    Manchester, 269 pp, £70.00, October 2012, ISBN 978 0 7190 8608 3
  • BuyThe End of Ulster Loyalism? by Peter Shirlow
    Manchester, 230 pp, £16.99, May 2012, ISBN 978 0 7190 8476 8

‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as intractable as ever and politicians would once more have to pay attention to the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’.

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Vol. 35 No. 3 · 7 February 2013 » » On the Window Ledge of the Union
pages 13-16 | 3256 words