Onwards and upwards
Jim Carroll

This is a summing up of the Unionist's historical attitude to a United Ireland from interviews and articles on a United Ireland.
It puts their stance in a nutshell, and compares the situation at the time of the interviews with that existing around World War One.
As it was then, so it is now and ever shall be – from the horse's mouths.
Jim Carroll

From Padraig O'Malley's 'The Uncivil Wars' (1983)
The failure of the British Army and the RUC to protect the Protestant community gives Loyalists a right to take matters into their own hands.

Ian Paisley:
"The Chief Constable had better know and Mrs. Thatcher had better know and James Prior had better know that the Protestants of Ulster have no intention no matter what Mr. Girvan says — or eleven Presbyterians or umpteen ex-moderators or umpteen ex-Methodist presidents, and the whole galaxy of gartered bishops and archbishops of the Church of Ireland — he better know this, that the ordinary Ulster man is not going to surrender to the IRA or be betrayed into a united Ireland or put his neck under the jackboot of popery. He better learn that, and this is war, and so be it.
"If the Crown in Parliament decreed to put Ulster into a united Ireland, we would be disloyal to Her Majesty if we did not resist such a surrender to our enemies."

Loyalty to Britain is seen as the only way to preclude incorpora¬tion into the Catholic-dominated Republic. But it is a conditional loyalty and does not necessarily indicate support for maintaining the U.K. link."
The attitude is almost prenationalistic — a contractarian conception of obligation going back to feudal times. Subjects owe a conditional allegiance to their ruler. But when the ruler fails to live up to his obligations, the subjects are entitled to look after their own interests, even to the extent of taking up arms against the ruler to bring him back to his senses. It is the message of 1912.

Jim Allister, Press Officer for the DUP:
""If Britain decided tomorrow to expel us, she should remember what happened in 1912 when Britain sought to expel the whole of Ireland.
The people of Northern Ireland not only said, "We don't wish to go, they said, "We won't go." And it paid off. So there's a message there: that the people of Northern Ireland have it within their power to say "We won't go." And they took action in 1912-that reversed the British government's attitude."

In 1912, nothing, it appeared, could stop the Third Home Rule Bill from becoming law. But Ulster Protestants would not have it; the Ulster Covenant was the signal of their resolve to resist. Nearly half a million men and women signed a declaration to use "all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed to give efficacy to the oath. Almost a hundred thousand volunteers enrolled. The army was disciplined, professional, and well-armed. The unwillingness of the British Army to move against the Volunteers precipitated the "Curragh mutiny" in 1914. The Home Rule crisis, it seemed was veering out of control. Ulster could not, would not, be coerced into a united Ireland. Only the outbreak of World War forestalled what appeared to be inevitable — either a constitutional crisis or a clash between the British Army and the Ulster militia. Home Rule was put on the shelf for the duration of hostilities. And there it stayed."