Many people on the English “mainland” seemed only faintly aware of this restive province off the coast of Scotland; others would be happy to let Northern Ireland go. After all, Britain had been shedding colonies for decades. In the words of one English journalist writing at the time, the unionists in Northern Ireland were “a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all.” To “loyalists”—as especially zealous unionists were known—this created a tendency to see oneself as the ultimate defender of a national identity that was in danger of extinction.
