"This everlasting teaching of hatred of England..."

Edna Longley observed:

"Irish Catholics and Ulster protestants not only tend to remember different things, but remember them in different ways."

Fiona Kennedy wrote in the Irish Times:

"When I was a child I learned from my grandmother that the Protestant heathens who lived next door had plundered and tortured us, ruined our language and culture and divided our country."

The UUP Report ‘Northern Ireland Fact and Falsehood - A frank look at the present and the past’ (1968) stated:

"A frequently repeated allegation is that Northern Ireland is an artificial creation, brought into being by a callous British partition of Ireland, without regard to the wishes of the inhabitants, and maintained ever since by questionable and even fraudulent means." 

Jennie Erdal wrote about Irish-born Louise Richardson in the FT:

"The young Louise Richardson had kept scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings of the Bloody Sunday atrocities, filling diaries with invectives against the occupying army. At her convent school, she and her classmates prayed beneath a statue of the crucified Christ. Beside the statue was the framed text of the Proclamation of Independence, with photographs of seven men executed for their part in the 1916 Easter Rising. 

“Their photographs were as familiar to me as the images of America’s founding fathers are to my children." 

"The crucifixion and the proclamation gave the same message: that the good are often persecuted, that you suffer for your beliefs, that in time truth will triumph"."

Northern Irish poet Nick Laird wrote:

"Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live in Londonderry. If instead of meeting my dad at a dance in Dublin, she had met a young butcher called Martin from the Bogside, maybe I would be Martin Jr. There was an Oedipal twist to my unlikely fantasy, because I also used to imagine killing him. And it wasn’t just me. At lunch in the school canteen, between telling stories about armalites or girls, exit wounds or telly programmes, we’d all go on about how much we’d love to fucking kill McGuinness. To blow him up. To gun him down. To do to him what his crowd had done, and was doing, to other people, to people we knew. Then, in the 1997 general election, after I had left home and gone to university in England, Martin McGuinness became our MP."

Edward Carson said in 1912:

"It is sufficient to say that this conflict [the land war] was ended, for the time at least, by the passing of Mr. Wyndham’s Land Act. We look forward in perfect confidence to the time when that great measure shall achieve its full result in wiping out the memory of many centuries of discord and hatred."

Edward Carson said in January 1921:

"There is no one in the world who would be more pleased to see an absolute unity in Ireland than I would, and it could be purchased tomorrow, at what does not seem to me a very big price. If the South and West of Ireland came forward tomorrow to Ulster and said – “Look here, we have to run our old island, and we have to run her together, and we will give up all this everlasting teaching of hatred of England, and we will shake hands with you, and you and we together, within the Empire, doing our best for ourselves and the United Kingdom, and for all His Majesty’s Dominion will join together”, I will undertake that we would accept the handshake."

He also said:

"Protestantism has in history been looked upon as the British occupation in Ireland."