Word: ulstermen
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...Battle of the Boyne in 1690. That victory established Britain's hegemony over the Emerald Isle, which continues in Northern Ireland even though the South broke away and formed the Republic of Ireland in 1921. The Boyne also set a pattern of religious hostility over which Ulstermen are still ready to spill blood. Though the prolongation of so ancient a feud may be a puzzle to the 1,000,000 Protestants and the 500,000 Catholics, it is the stuff of their everyday lives (see box, following page...
...longer one talks the clearer it becomes that Ulstermen are fighting one another not over the future or even the present but the past. Like many of his friends, Ball has the upraised red hand tattooed on a forearm and is fiercely proud of the sash of his Loyal Orange Order lodge. "It's handed down for generations," he says. "My father belonged, and he handed his sash down to my elder brother." Ball says he would not shrink from the showdown he fully expects - even though "if I was to get shot and die tonight, Maureen would...
...curfew. After the riots, General Freeland ordered his men to shoot to kill civilians carrying weapons. For a few days, such strict measures helped avert fresh outbursts in Belfast, even though 12,000 Protestants marched there in parades commemorating the 1916 Battle of the Somme in which 5,000 Ulstermen died. At week's end, however, pitched battles erupted between Catholics and troops who had discovered a cache of hidden weapons off the Falls Road. One civilian was crushed under an armored car and four died of gunshot wounds; at least a score of people were wounded, including...
...their kerns and galloglasses (light- and heavy-armed infantry) won a succession of victories over the Earl of Essex, the Queen's favorite. The war dragged on for nearly a decade, and was climaxed by the Battle of Kinsale, at which the English defeated a combined force of Ulstermen and Spaniards...
...church that the angry Ulstermen fear so much is a good deal more adaptable than they admit. As soon as the English eased the fierce penal laws in the 1800s, it made its quiet peace with them, and by the 1916 rebellion was a definite anti-revolutionary force. In the '20s, it excommunicated Eamon de Valera for his part in the bloodshed, only to turn up shortly thereafter in full partnership with...