ULSTER, IRELAND AND GREAT BRITAIN
ONE PEOPLE … ONE FAITH … ONE THRONE
POLITICAL necessities over several generations have caused the people of Northern Ireland to think of themselves as Ulstermen rather than Irishmen. This is the greatest possible tragedy of our history. It is only when viewed in the context of Ireland that the Ulster story makes sense. Without Ireland, Ulster has no past, no present or no future! Recently a document was presented to the public by a political group who offered it as the work of intelligent men and as a basis for intelligent thought. In its pages they spoke of Ulster Independence and referred to ‘a sense of Ulster identity, and a sense of the alien character of outsiders, whether British or Irish’. Alien character indeed! How ridiculous can we get! If we are not British and, we are not Irish what mongrel breed are we?
The suggestion that Northern Ireland is a separate ethnic group or has become such by some strange process is ridiculous in the extreme. We are Irishmen all, whether born in Belfast or Dublin, in the Glens of Antrim or some lonely place in Connemara. Ireland is our home, Ireland gave us birth, this is the rock from whence we all have been hewn! Tragically the republican denies the Ulsterman his birthright, that of being an Irishman, while the Ulsterman turns away from his heritage! It is only the historically illiterate or those who have a political motive who would suggest that we have two races in Ireland.
The Ulster Protestant knows so little about the history of his own country that he has handed over to the enemy the most glorious parts of his heritage. Many Ulstermen believe that there were no Protestants in Ireland before the Battle of the Boyne, or the Plantation of Ulster. Nothing could be further from the truth! Ireland was not always Papist! St. Patrick never bowed the knee to Rome! The Saint preached a simple Gospel based on New Testament standards and opened his churches hundreds of years before Romanism had taken root in our land. Protestantism is not some foreign growth striving for its existence in an alien soil! It is the historic faith of the Irish!
Ulstermen need not apologise for laying claim to an Irish heritage. Did not St. Patrick spend his first years in Ireland among the hills of County Antrim! Did he not set up his First Church in County Down and did he not organise his See in County Armagh? In A. D. 517 St. Comgall was born in Magheramorne, Co. Antrim and about A.D. 558 he founded his great centre of worship and learning in Bangor, County Down. St. Comgall was a man imbued with missionary zeal and a born leader. Soon he had gathered so many men around him that according to one historian ‘they could not all be in one place’. Other places of learning had to be opened across Ulster and throughout the other provinces of Ireland. In these some three thousand men were in training, preparing to take the simple Gospel not only across Ireland but to every corner of the British Isles, and so set it free from the Druidic religion. At this point in history Romanism had hardly been heard of in these islands!
If Ulstermen would make a study of Irish history they might recapture the vigour and the vitality that is missing in present day Protestantism! They might also discover something of the grandeur and the glory of being Irish! After all it all started here! The great Winston Churchill tells us that the Christian heritage of the British people ‘was cradled in the mists of Ireland’. Green, in his History of the English People, tells us that ‘not from Rome but from the ancient Irish Church, did England chiefly derive her Christianity’.
And that is not all! A study of Irish history might also give to the Ulster people a sense of responsibility for Ireland as a whole, and help them to discover the indivisible oneness of the Irish people. After all, Ireland is ours! Such a sense of responsibility, faithfully implemented, would help to atone in some small way, for generations of neglect when we allowed Popery to run rampant and enslave those who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. The fact that the biggest part of our land and the majority of our people are held by the enemy does not absolve us from responsibility, it only makes the task more difficult!
Left to die!
Their faces bear the story,
Wronged by cruel hate they live beneath a lie;
As if for them the Cross could have no glory –
We have let them die.
Sociologists and Psychotherapists the world over, are struggling to find what will remove the deep seated mark of emotional deprivation, left on the life of a child estranged from its parents. Irish republicans bear all the marks of political and spiritual deprivation that comes with such separation. The tragedy is that this separation has been caused by a stranger – one who is not of our family, an old man who lives on the banks of the Tiber! Irish Roman Catholics wander the earth in their millions like lost souls, driven thither, not by economic reasons as is so often suggested, but in an endless emotional search for the source and goal of their very existence. They burn up their years seeking the one element that would bring them fulfilment.
For generations Irish Roman Catholics have been reared on hatred of England. They have been conned and brainwashed into believing that which is contrary to historic fact.
Take then our answer, England,
We speak it straight and true;
We have but hands to strike you,
And hearts of hate for you.
These are the words that have resounded through a thousand classrooms in the Roman Catholic Schools of Ireland, as our children are moulded into second-class citizens, in order that there would be an endless supply of recruits to bomb and blast the target of Papal hate – the Protestant character of the British people. The pious platitudes of peace from Roman Catholic spokesmen sound hollow when the facts are known! Hatred such as this short-circuits all that is good and noble in human nature, and makes it impossible for a people to rise to the full stature of nationhood.
If the indivisible oneness of the Irish people is beyond dispute, then the indivisible oneness of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic people of these British Isles cannot be denied. Sir Arthur Keith, one of the great Anthropologists, says
‘From the physical point of view the Celt and the Saxon are one. Whatever be the source of their antagonism, it does not lie in a difference of Race’
If the antagonism between Ireland and England is not of race then we must look elsewhere. All the years of bloodshed and suffering stretching back into the dim distant past, all the frustrated hopes of a people, can be traced to one source – the lying, history distorting ability of the Roman Church. Countless thousands of Irishmen have lived and died believing that their native land was desecrated by the hated Protestants of Ulster. Millions more have gone out into the world with lives soured and twisted by hatred of England, and in every generation men have laid down their lives for a lie! And all this time we were one family, who should have been enriching the world with all that God and nature has given us so bountifully.
Not only is the Irish people part of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic people of these islands, but to them belongs a glory that is theirs alone! For it was in Ireland on the hill of Tara, in County Meath, that the tender plant of Royalty took root. It was there that the present Royal House of Britain began! This thin red line of Royalty runs from Tara to Dalriada in County Antrim, thence to Scotland and on to London. This was what James 1 of England was thinking when at the Council table in Whitehall, on April 21, 1613, he said:
‘There is a double reason why 1 should be careful of the welfare of the Irish people. First as King of England and also as King of Scotland, for the ancient Kings of Scotland are descended of the Kings of Ireland.’
Could anything be clearer? Here is history as it should be! History as it happened, history undistorted by the Papacy! The Annals of Clonmacnoise, one of the most historic documents in Ireland, tells the same story.
‘This stone remained a long time in the King of Ireland’s Palace at Tara, whereon many Kings and Queens were crowned, until it was sent over into Scotland by the King of Ireland with his son Fergus who was the first King of Scotland. For a long time all the Kings of Scotland received their crowns thereon until the time of King Edward 1 of England who placed it in Westminster Abbey.’
So here is the story we are compelled to accept, not by force of argument or at the point of a gun, but by the hard facts of history! An Ireland united, proudly taking her place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, sharing in a common faith to the Glory of God, deeply conscious of her great and abiding honour in providing the Royal House to rule the Kingdom. One people! One faith! One Throne! Can the story be realised? Is it a possibility? Have the Protestants of Ulster sufficient intelligence to realise the significance of the Ulster conflict? Are our Politicians at Westrninster prepared to cast aside the devious influence that compel them to follow policies contrary to the best interests of the British people? Have our Roman Catholic people sufficient strength to throw off the chains that have bound them for centuries? Or must the present state of affairs remain with us for ever?
Courtesy of Watchman Ministry
