Ah Jim are you beginning to see now why it is important for you to give details as to who is saying what and when they said it.

None of which matters a damn though as the opinions of de Valera and Paisley on the subject of Ulster are about as predictable as the headline "Dog bites man". And nothing alters the fact that agreement was reached by all parties by the 8th July 1914.

If you want to start understanding history you should try reading objective accounts of what actually happened, not fictional, or subjective accounts of what people think happened.

Here is another fact for you - at no time at all was permanent partition ever offered or guaranteed to the Unionists in the North. You have repeatedly stated that it was, now tell us all who offered it and when, because the 1914 Act was based upon an agreed six year temporary partition period and the 1920 Act was based upon the same six year temporary exclusion - You would actually know that had you bothered to read either Act, you haven't, preferring instead to read what others believed it inferred.

Yet another fact for you Jim is that after the 1916 Rising neither side Republican or Unionist ever bothered attending meetings that could have resulted in any compromise being reached. Why? Because what happened in Dublin in 1916 was seized on by both sides as excuses to dig their heels in. Attitudes hardened (Still haven't got back to us as to when it was in 1916 that that "crucial meeting" of the Ulster Unionists Council took place have you - or are you just conveniently ignoring the information that one was held that year?) which meant that after the General Election of 1918 it was impossible to implement the 1914 Act, which led to its repeal and the implementation of the 1920 Act. The Sinn Fein "Government" of the Republic of Ireland ignored the 1920 Act, while the Unionists in the North embraced it as it gave them their own formal duly appointed political forum within the United Kingdom.

Sinn Fein started their "War of Independence" on the 19th January 1919 and having done so must accept the consequences of taking that course of action. By the summer of 1921 the "War" had been fought to a stalemate and in July 1921 a Truce was established and peace negotiations were entered into. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on the 6th December 1921 but it took exactly one year until the Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922 came into force and Northern Ireland seceded from the Irish Free State, in accordance with its rights under Article 5 of the Treaty. Had there been no war, there would have been no truce, there would have been no negotiations in which Northern Irish interests would have been represented or taken into account, no formal secession, no permanent partition of Ireland.

To state that I do not need to provide links, or sources, because I am not attempting to support someone else's opinions as to how or why things happened, I am merely stating what actually happened in fact.