Two versions of Irish history
In the Irish conflict each party has his own history writing. The following extracts from two political parties' web sites demonstrate very different interpretations of the same story.
Party Leader: First Minister, Rt Hon David Trimble MP MLA.
The Act of Union (1801) put a political stamp on the economic, cultural and ancestral links that had existed between the peoples of the British Isles since the earliest recorded history.
Today those links remain the rationale for the union. Despite breaking from the Union, the Irish Republic remains a component part of the British Isles economy. Northern Ireland (N.I.) chose to remain within the Union and her people have continued to do so.
Northern Ireland has always been distinct from the rest of the island of Ireland. It is a hybrid of Scots and Irish culture and was marked as a place apart in the ancient Celtic legends. Scots culture became the predominant influence with the last great wave of migration which occurred before most European settlers arrived in North America.
Ulster’s relationship is not defined by legislation alone nor are the ties with Great Britain (GB) merely historical.
The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was formed in 1905 in response to the threat to the Union posed by the Home Rule crisis in Ireland. The founding father of the Ulster Unionist Party, Sir Edward Carson, viewed the establishment of a parliament at Stormont to be a dilution of the Union. However, once Stormont was in place, the UUP willingly and fully played its role in the political system of the day. Being the largest party in NI, the UUP was called upon to form the first Government. Over the next fifty years, while in government, the party worked to good effect for the peace and prosperity of the country.
The UUP remain true to their founding principles - commitment to the Union and British citizenship. The UK is a multi-cultural entity and as such British citizenship safeguards the civil liberties of all its peoples.
The UUP is opposed to any form of nationalism which it views as exclusive and confrontational. The effects of nationalism are still evident in parts of Europe today. It remains a threat to the peaceful co-existence of the people of NI.
Party President: Gerry Adams MP
THROUGHOUT history, the island of Ireland has been regarded as a single national unit. Prior to the Norman invasions from England In 1169, the Irish people were distinct from other nations, cultivating their own system of law, culture, language, and political and social structures.
Until 1921, the island of Ireland was governed as a single political unit as a colony of Britain. A combined political/military campaign by Irish nationalists between the years 1916 to 1921 forced the British government to consider its position.
With the objective of `protecting English interests with an economy of English lives' (Lord Birkenhead), the partition of Ireland was conceived.
Partition was imposed on the Irish people by an Act of Parliament, the Government of Ireland Act (1920), passed in the British legislature. The consent of the Irish people was never sought and was never freely given.
Proffered as a solution under the threat of ``immediate and terrible war'' (Lloyd George, the then British Prime Minister). The Act made provision for the creation of two states in Ireland: the ``Irish Free State'' (later to become known as the Republic of Ireland), containing 26 of Ireland's 32 counties; and ``Northern Ireland'' containing the remalnlng six counties.
Northern Ireland (the Six Counties) represented the greatest land area in which Irish unionists could maintain a majority.
The partition line first proposed had encompassed the whole province of Ulster (nine counties). Unionists rejected this because they could not maintain a majority in such an enlarged area.
The partition of Ireland was merely an innovation of the British governments tried and trusted colonial strategy of divide and rule, used throughout its former colonial empire.
However, while the British government had the single objective of `protecting English interests', its strategy for achieving this created deeper, more acute and more bitter multiple divisions in Irish society than those previously fostered, and which, until then, had helped sustain British rule in Ireland.
Partition did not only physically divide the national territory of Ireland. It spawned the Civil War in 1922, which has moulded politics in the 26-County state ever since. It made more acute the divisions between nationalists and unionists in the Six-County state, and between the population of the two states. Not least, it created real and lasting divisions among nationalists themselves.
Increasingly, partition has generated the foolish and self-interested ostrich mentality in the power structures of the two statelets, which seeks piecemeal treatment of the symptoms, through coercion and censorship, instead of root-and-branch treatment of the problem.
Throughout the 19th century and until partition in this century, the British government provided its colonial rule in Ireland with a cover of `democracy'. Like other colonial powers in continental Europe, which `integrated' their colonies into the imperialist state, Britain `integrated' Ireland into the `United Kingdom' through the Act of Union (1801), which made provision for Irish representation at the British parliament.
In the changed conditions of a full-blown struggle for independence in 1920, new means for `protecting British interests' had to be found together with a new `justification' for the continuing British presence which that necessitated.
The `wishes' of Irish unionists in North East Ireland have provided that `justification' since partition.