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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MARCH 19, 1982
PAGE 20
The Ulster Protestants are descended in the main from settlers
who came to Ulster from Scotland and England in the first decade
of the seventeenth century [ about the same time as the early
English settlements in America l. Now, in the eyes of many Afri
cans and Asians, and of left-wing Europeans, the mere word "set
tlers" in itself decides the question. Settlers, by definition,
ought either to go back, in the words of the song, "to from whence
they came," or to stay on under political and social institutions
devised by the natives [ meaning to become a four to one minority
in a Catholic-dominated united Ireland].
But you, as Americans, can't quite take that view, can you?
After all, these people's ancestors were established in Ulster
before--and I imagine quite a long time before--most of your own
ancestors left Ireland to settle in America. Clearly the fact of
being descended from settlers does not automatically put people
in the wrong. There has to be something else.
And, of course, there is. These people are descended not from
people who left Ireland to settle in America--obviously a right
and proper course of action--but from people who left Britain to
settle in Ireland--obviously a wrong one. I don't know that I
could prove precisely why the first is so clearly right, and the
second so clearly wrong, but in these matters proof is not what
counts; what counts is what you feel in your bones.
But then, you see, these Ulster Protestants also have bones, in
which they feel quite as strongly as--probably more strongly
than--you do, and their bones tell them quite different things
from what your bones tell you. Their bones tell them, most in
sistently, two things:
First, that they mean to stay in Ulster.
Second, that � h h y will not be included in � ny political structure
in which Iris
ca'thoITcs-are in a maJority [ emphasis ours
t'nroughout ] .
-- -- -
The determination of Ulster Protestants to remain in Ulster is
comparable to the determination of Israelis to remain in Israel.
And the refusar-of Ulster Protestants to be incorporated in a
Catholic-majority Irish state is as stubborn as the refusal of
Israelis to be incorporated in� Arab-maJority Palestine.
(Or, one might add, Afrikaners in a black-majority South Africa.)
Mr. O'Brien then explains that the average Ulsterman's loyalty to Britain
is
a qualified, complex, conditional loyalty. It is loyalty to the
crown rather than to Parliament••.• In Ulster�fhe fact that the
crown is a Protestant crown, by the laws of the realm, retains an
emotional importance that it has lost in the rest of the United
Kingdom. That itself implies a condition. For if the crown in
Parliament--the contemporary constitutional crown--acts in a
manner that suggests to Ulster Protestants that they are about to