Ulster unionism

Ulster unionism appears as both a constitutional loyalty to the British crown and a defensive account of who belongs in Northern Ireland. In the book’s account of the march from Belfast toward Derry, that identity is expressed through fears of Catholic numerical and political ascendancy, the memory of Protestant resistance, and the suspicion that Britain might not protect its supporters. The resulting confrontation exposes a central tension: unionist attachment to Britain could coexist with a sense of being neglected by it, while Protestant allegiance itself was contested within families and among working people.

Political meaning and social division

The marchers’ challenge to unionism began with a different reading of the division between the communities. Dolours Price had come to see the sectarian schism as a distraction from shared class hardship. Working-class Protestants, she believed, also struggled with unemployment and poor housing; residents of the Shankill Road did not necessarily have indoor toilets. A united, socialist Ireland seemed to her a possible answer to conditions that crossed the religious divide. Eamonn McCann similarly urged protesters not to treat Protestant workers as enemies, but as people disadvantaged by landed and industrialist unionists. These arguments distinguished ordinary working people from the political forces claiming to speak for them.

For Ronald Bunting and his supporters, by contrast, the march was not simply a campaign for civil rights. Bunting, a former British Army officer and high-school mathematics teacher known to followers as the Major, led counterprotesters who jeered the marchers, tried to seize their banners, and raised the Union Jack. His formation as a unionist was also personal and political: once more progressive, he came under the influence of Ian Paisley after Paisley tended to his dying mother. Bunting’s reply to a journalist who asked whether the march might be better ignored—“You can’t ignore the devil, brother”—turned political opposition into a stark moral and religious confrontation.

Fear, loyalty, and threatened identity

The narrative places Bunting’s militancy within anxieties that reached beyond him. Terence O’Neill, prime minister of Northern Ireland’s devolved government, described a basic Protestant fear that Catholics would outnumber them. The perceived danger was not only demographic. Some unionists doubted whether London would come to their rescue, while people in Britain seemed unaware of the province or willing to let it go. In that setting, particularly zealous unionists—described as loyalists—could understand themselves as the last defenders of a national identity facing extinction.

The book gives that defensive self-image an older poetic expression in Rudyard Kipling’s “We perish if we yield.” It also shows how the remembered history of Derry could make a present-day march feel like a renewed assault. Although Derry’s population was predominantly Catholic, loyalist symbolic memory centered on the city’s successful defense in 1689 by Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange against a Catholic army loyal to James II. Protestant organizations commemorated the siege with annual marches. Bunting and Paisley drew on that tradition to portray the student marchers approaching the city as if they were reenacting the siege, turning an old conflict into an immediate political warning.

Mobilization on the road to Derry

The confrontation was organized as well as rhetorical. On the night before the march’s final day, Bunting assembled loyalists in Derry’s Guildhall for a gathering billed as a prayer meeting, where Paisley was ready to address them. Paisley’s preaching cast Roman Catholicism as a menace and alleged a secret alliance between the Vatican and the Republic of Ireland to overthrow the Northern Irish state. He described Catholics as poised to become “a tiger ready to tear her prey to pieces.” The marchers, he told his followers, were not peaceful civil-rights advocates but “IRA men” in disguise; he invoked Derry’s role as a bulwark against Catholic encroachment and called on his audience to defend the city again.

The account describes a pattern in Paisley’s agitation: he could whip a crowd into a violent mood and then leave before stones were thrown. Bunting, acting as his designated adjutant, made the threat more concrete, urging anyone who wanted to play a “manly role” to arm themselves with “whatever protective measures they feel to be suitable.” During the night, local men assembled large stones in fields above the road. A sympathetic farmer provided a tractor to gather the rocks, which were piled at strategic points in preparation for an ambush. The unionist defense of the city’s symbolic inheritance thus moved from speech and spectacle to practical preparations for violence.

A divided Protestant identity

Ronnie Bunting’s presence among the marchers complicates any account of unionism as a uniform Protestant position. A student at Queen’s University Belfast, he had moved toward radical politics in the summer of 1968. His father was leading the counterprotest against the procession in which he himself marched. Ronnie complained to his friends that his father was making a fool of himself, but the conflict seems only to have sharpened both men’s resolve. Their relationship makes the political division intimate: a father’s public defense of loyalism and a son’s participation in a civil-rights march occupied the same family and the same contested landscape.

Ronnie was not the only Protestant among the marchers, and the narrative recalls a longer tradition of Protestants who supported Irish independence, including Wolfe Tone, the Protestant leader of the 1798 rebellion against British rule. This history resists the equation of Protestant identity with unionism, just as McCann’s appeal to shared working-class interests resists the equation of Protestant workers with their political leaders. The episode presents unionism as powerful partly because it could bind constitutional loyalty, religious history, and fear of abandonment together, but it also shows the limits of that claim to represent all Protestants.

Narrative significance

The march toward Derry reveals how competing political vocabularies assigned opposite meanings to the same procession. For the marchers, nonviolent protest tested whether civil rights could cross the sectarian divide. For Bunting and Paisley, the march revived a siege and threatened the survival of Protestant identity. The tension is not resolved by the evidence: it intensifies as the crowd advances toward Burntollet Bridge, where loyalist preparation confronts the marchers’ stated commitment to nonviolence. Unionism therefore functions not merely as allegiance to Britain, but as a contested story about threat, historical memory, and who can claim to defend the people of Northern Ireland.