As an academic subject the Northern Ireland problem has been exhaustively researched, and continues to be so. Nevertheless, there exist some areas that remain relatively unexplored. This work addresses one of these: namely, the relationship between the British extreme-Right and Ulster/Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. Studies of British fascism have not entirely ignored the subject, especially with reference to the recent troubles, and anyone entering the field of British fascist studies will find themselves indebted to the specialists who have made it their own: specialists such as Richard Griffiths, Roger Griffin, Roger Eatwell, Stuart Rawnsley, Colin Holmes, Thomas Linehan, Nigel Copsey, Richard Thurlow, Matthew Goodwin, Graham Macklin and Paul Jackson, among others; not least Tom Villis whose work on British Catholics and facism in the inter-war period has illuminated an important under-researched area. However, their perspective, for understandable reasons, has been primarily focused on Britain. Irish independence in 1921 removed the large Irish presence from the House of Commons and thus the Irish question from the heart of British politics, while regional autonomy in Northern Ireland under its own administration was allowed to proceed with little oversight from Westminster for 50 years, a period in which a host of grievances developed that ultimately led to the Northern Ireland conflict from the late 1960s. But Northern Ireland had been a constitutionally problematic entity from the beginning, and it is in this context that the case for examining the region in the context of fascism should be seen.

Central to British fascist ambitions was belief in the emergence of a great national crisis that would discredit the established political parties and thus create the space for a fascist takeover, but the envisaged crisis never occurred. The only part of the United Kingdom that could be said to have approximated those conditions was Ulster/Northern Ireland. In the years from 1912 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 the Ulster crisis came close to pulling the United Kingdom as a whole into a state of civil war, while from 1921 the region was under attack from both constitutional nationalism and republican paramilitarism until the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998.