#ulstermen

[citizen69]

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blair "Paddy" Mayne from Newtownards, county Down, was a founding member of the Special Air Service (SAS), an Irish international rugby player, cricketer and amateur boxing champion. 

His war-time exploits during WWII were the stuff of a Boys' Own adventure. He was one of the most decorated soldiers of the British Army and was the first to receive the Distinguished Service Order four times. His adventures on and off the battlefield were legendary.

You can read an entertaining article on his badass wartime exploits here... http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=54504828545

[brianjohnspencer]

Whereas the English believe that compromise is the answer to all disputes, Ulstermen believe the opposite. The resulting mesentente leads Ulstermen and Englishmen to despair of one another.

A.T.Q. Stewart, ‘The Narrow Ground - Aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969’ (1977) (p. 101) (See here: http://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/139293467058/atq-stewart-why-did-the-northern)

[brianjohnspencer]

Religion has an importance for Ulster people that it has for few modern peoples. You will find, for example, that the historic conflict of Protestant with Catholic which split Europe three centuries ago is still a living one in Ulster, and that everything is seen in terms of it... But do not forget that in every country in the world one finds an opposition of peoples. It may be an opposition of race, of temperament, of religion, of class. In old and rural Ulster the opposition is between Catholic and Protestant: in new and industrial counties it is between Left-wing and Right-wing.

W. R. Rogers, 'The Ulstermen and their Country', p. 15

[brianjohnspencer]

Politics is the chief recreation of the Ulsterman.

W. R. Rogers, 'The Ulstermen and Their Country', p. 11

[brianjohnspencer]

John Hewitt - ‘The Ideal Ulsterman’

John Hewitt wrote in Ancestral Voices

“The whole point of the ideal Ulsterman is simply that he must carry within himself elements of both Scots and English with a strong charge of the basic Irish. When I discovered, not long ago, that the old Planter’s Gothic tower of Kilmore Church still encloses the stump of a round tower and that it was built on the site of a Culdee holy place [older than Saint Patrick’s mission], I felt a step nearer to that synthesis. It is the best symbol I have yet found for the strange textures of my response to this island of which I am a native. I may appear Planter’s Gothic, but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter.” 

As a point of interest ‘Planter’s Gothic’ is the designation of an architectural style in Ulster (see Denis O’D. Hanna, ‘Architecture in Ulster’).