This chapter sets out why a history of Ulster loyalism in the three counties after partition matters and outlines the literature on ethnic conflict, Ulster loyalism, and terrorism and political violence in Ireland. The chapter then sets out the book’s two main arguments. First, memories of the violence experienced by one generation of Protestants in the three counties entrenched a sense of separation from the new Irish state on the part of subsequent generations. Intergenerational grievance and inter-communal distance kept loyalism alive and set the conditions for militancy and revenge in the future, including during the Troubles. Three-county loyalists played an important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of three-county loyalists’ considerable impact on Northern Ireland’s security forces and radical or militant Ulster movements since partition. It describes how these individuals generally came from families that were threatened with, or experienced, republican or agrarian violence after partition. The chapter also explores the important roles played by three-county loyalists in paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association during the Troubles. A number of these individuals came from areas that had seen high levels of loyalist militancy in the first half of the century, suggesting an intergenerational consistency across the twentieth century.

This chapter underlines the main contribution of the book. It argues that Ulster loyalism has survived within the Irish state to the present day. The ’affective bonds’ or culture created in previous generations persisted. Three counties’ loyalists were still willing to embrace an Ulster identity even after the partition of the province. What mattered more than political logic or calculation was sentiment. It also observes an enduring strain of frontier militancy in Ulster, summarises the tactical successes of three counties’ loyalists and their wider movements in the 1920s and again in 1970s but concludes that militancy in successive conflicts only served to delay conciliatory reforms, truces and peace agreements.

This chapter examines the resurgence of suspicions among republicans towards real or imagined loyalists in the three counties, that some Protestants were acting as a loyalist ’fifth column’ for the security forces and/or paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. A successful loyalist cross-border paramilitary campaign in the early 1970s precipitated an IRA counter-intelligence operation to eliminate spies in the three counties. Families that were well known locally for their historical involvement in loyalism were again targeted by the IRA in the 1970s. The chapter outlines the suspicions and inter-communal violence in County Monaghan that led to the murder of Senator Billy Fox and the burning of the family home of his fiancée, Marjorie Coulson.

A dominant theme running throughout Heaney’s writing was the tension between art and political commitment, between personal vision and the demands of the community. The relationship between his writing and his politics is complex but insistent. Raised in a Catholic family in County Derry with a broadly 'anti-Partitionist stance', he was always alert to social, political and sectarian difference. He claimed his family background was nationalist, with little emphasis on the Republican tradition. His first overtly political journalism appeared during the Civil Rights period. He later found “emblems of adversity” in poetic images of bog bodies which he described in mythic method poems, but he wrote many historical, allegorical and parable poems which were infused with a political undercurrent. Generally he was wary of becoming co-opted by political dogma, but his deepest impulses were compassionate and allied with personal and artistic liberty, human dignity, political freedom, and civil rights.

Emerging from four nations romantic scholarship and recent historical revisionism, this chapter challenges the negative view of the liminal period 1798–1800 as a dark and silent moment, following the collapse of United Irish republicanism and its associated publications. Pushing beyond 1798, public print and private correspondence discoveries in relation to key figures among elite and working-class circles alike yield evidence of continued collaboration towards the goal of a more high-brow, if less overtly political, northern periodical culture in Ireland. These circles contributed to several ‘enlightened’ periodicals like the Belfast Monthly Magazine (1808–14) and the Belfast Literary Journal (1815), which enabled a productive collision of politically radical writers like James Orr, Dr William Drennan, and Samuel Thomson with the ascendancy of conservatives, particularly the coterie poets of Bishop Thomas Percy. This chapter focuses on a key study of a short-lived Belfast periodical, The Microscope and Minute Observer (1799–1800), a unique publication that represents the convergence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic literary energies at a pivotal point of historical flux.

This chapter focusses on the largely separate development of a network of Protestant nationalists in Ulster. It shows how an older generation of activists, notably Alice Milligan and Francis Joseph Bigger, sought to inculcate nationalist sentiment in younger Protestants. It traces the development of a mostly Belfast-based network, from their beginnings in various cultural nationalist groups, including the Ulster Literary Theatre, towards their adoption of a nationalist ideology, largely under the influence of the young Quaker nationalist Bulmer Hobson. This chapter also discusses the unusual development of the Independent Orange Order, whose leadership adopted a home rule ideology, and some of whom later defected to republicanism. It also assesses the efforts of Hobson and Denis McCullough to revive the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ulster; and Hobson’s efforts, by means of the Dungannon Clubs, to promote republicanism among northern Protestants. The chapter closes with a discussion of the manner in which pressure from unionist co-religionists resulted in the breaking up of the Belfast group of Protestant nationalists, and their dispersal throughout Britain and southern Ireland.