THE ULSTERCONFLICT an Ulster Volunteer Force, with sufficient weaponry to defend a Protestant state in Ulster, even in defiance of a British Act of Parliament. This has been the characteristic stance of the ultra-loyalists in Ulster from that time until today: they give so much allegiance to the existing regime (which presumably they see as beneficent to themselves) that they are ready to reject compliance with new laws that they consider inconsistent with the model they support. In a way they could be compared with the white colonialists in Rhodesia who declared and enforced a unilateral independence to maintain the status quo, but the difference is that the Protestants in Ulster forma real community there, and it is fairly unlikely that they could ever be extirpated by the I.R.A., even with the open support of the Irish Army. The only result of such a conflict would be a barren waste called "peace". In the 1912/14 period the Ulster unionists could also rely on the publicly declared support of the Conservative party in Britain, whose current leader was the descendant of Ulster parents, and with the tacit support of officers in the British army. When the British government attempted to mount a show of force in Ulster to convince the Protestants of the wisdom of accepting the Home Rule Bill, the British officers stationed at the Curragh army camp threatened to resign their commissions rather than comply with the government's wishes. The two year gap between the passing of the Home Rule Bill and its proposed implementation, allowed the u.u.e. to mount a propaganda campaign in Britain against the iniquity of incorporating Protestants within a Catholic state; and to develop the Ulster Volunteer Force as a functioning unit. By the end of July 1914, when the Home Rule Bill had passed in the Commons for the last time, Ulster Protestants had a stock of more than 40,000 rifles, with ammunition and men organized to use them. An even more spectacular publicity coup had been the public signing by more than 90% of the adult Protestant population of Ulster of a loyal Covenant which was worded as follows: "Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of lreland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, roen of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress 47
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