A report on Ulster loyalism and Partition of Ireland

Northern Ireland was created in 1921, when Ireland was partitioned by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, creating a devolved government for the six northeastern counties.

In the late 1960s, a campaign to end discrimination against Catholics and nationalists was opposed by loyalists, who saw it as a republican front.

Since Partition (1921), as Ulster Unionism its goal has been to maintain Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom and to resist a transfer of sovereignty to an all-Ireland republic.

Joined by loyalist labour, on the eve of World War I this broad opposition to Irish self-government concentrated in Belfast and its hinterlands as Ulster Unionism, and prepared an armed resistance—the Ulster Volunteers.

While the Catholic minority there mostly backed Irish independence, the Protestant majority were mostly unionist/loyalist.

In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland.

This, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, led to the partition of Ireland.

The war provided Protestant loyalists with the iconic victories of the Siege of Derry, the Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690) and the Battle of Aughrim (12 July 1691), all of which the Orange Order commemorate each year.

A key issue was the status of Northern Ireland.

Unionists and loyalists, who for historical reasons were mostly Ulster Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom.

The Ulster Volunteers was a unionist, loyalist militia founded in 1912 to block domestic self-government ("Home Rule") for Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom.

After the war, the British Government decided to partition Ireland into two self-governing regions: Northern Ireland (which overall had a Protestant/unionist majority) and Southern Ireland.

The Orange Order is a conservative, British unionist and Ulster loyalist organisation.

Before the partition of Ireland, the Order's headquarters were in Dublin, which at one stage had more than 300 private lodges.

Belfast suffered greatly during the violence that accompanied the partition of Ireland, and especially during the more recent conflict known as the Troubles.

These opposing groups in this conflict are now often termed republican and loyalist respectively, although they are also loosely referred to as 'nationalist' and 'unionist'.

Ireland has been partitioned since May 1921, when the implementation of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 created the state of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) had a united Ireland as its goal during the conflict with British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries from the 1960s to the 1990s known as The Troubles.

HM Government's ability to face down unionist defiance was thrown into question by the "Curragh incident", when dozens of British Army officers tendered their resignations rather than secure arms against Ulster loyalist seizure, forcing a climb-down by the government.

Unionists continued to demand that Ulster be excluded, the solution of partition appealing to Craig; Carson, however, as a Dublin man, did not want partition, which would leave 250,000 Southern Unionists at the mercy of a huge nationalist majority.