You often encounter genteel English horror at the vision of those terrible people in Ulster fighting over religion. This terrible disapproval comes from the same psychological wellspring whereby former forty-a-day cigarette-smokers become anti-smoking prigs: when the English were in full flight, they too were well able to persecute their opponents on grounds of religion. The Anglican Church was not always meek and mild: the eighteenth-century ‘Penal Laws’ – enacted in the Age of Enlightenment – not only dispossessed Irish Papists of all entitlements in their own country but were pretty mean-spirited to the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians too. 

One of the points that Derek Lundy brings out in this personable and flavoursome journey through the history and adventures of Ulster and Ulstermen is that the catch-all ‘Protestant’ clan in Northern Ireland contains two distinct Protestant clans: the Anglicans, with their roots in Englishness, and the Presbyterians and Dissenters,