So if it were 20% who said they were Irish from the Unionist/Protestant community in 1968, which is a lot more than today, have a stab at how many more thought they were Irish (because they are) 50 or 75 years earlier.

S'alright. They are still British in the here and now. The law says they can be.

Don't get so uppity. Just reporting historical data to back up my 'numpty' claim

I haven't served the main course yet.

Enjoy.

The following is an abridgement of a worthwhile column in Belfast Telegraph, 10 Dec 2008.
The author is a professor of Irish Studies in the school of politics at Queen's University Belfast.

Bertie Ahern once declared that one of the "saddest developments" in recent decades has been "the reduction in the number of people in the North from a Protestant unionist and loyalist background who regard themselves as Irish, or as both Irish and British".

The movement in the northern unionist community away from an Irish identity, however, did not take place overnight and in fact many unionists retained a strong Irish dimension for decades. For example in 1929, in a debate in the Northern Ireland parliament, a unionist MP stated: "We are Irishmen ... I always hold that Ulstermen are Irishmen and the best of Irishmen." The speaker was none other than the unionist leader, Lord Craigavon. In 1936, he would repeat this point: "While we are Ulstermen, we are also Irishmen." When Craigavon died in 1940, John M Andrews, his successor, paid tribute to him as a "great Ulsterman, a great Irishman and a great Imperialist".

There is plenty for you to chew on. You just don't want to recognise the actual truth from the past. Unionists saw themselves as Irish. They had linguistic and cultural affinity with all things Irish. Of course they did. That is until the political sh1te hit with Home Rule talk.

You are half-Irish yourself. You should know this stuff already.

I repeat from above from the Professor of Irish Studies.

"One hundred years ago most unionists in Ireland, north and south, regarded themselves as Irish. Post-1921, we can see the development of a heightened sense of British identity, embracing Ulster, or Northern Ireland, which denied increasingly any sense of Irishness. At the same time, the new Irish Free State experienced the growth of its own heightened form of Irish/Gaelic identity.

The movement in the northern unionist community away from an Irish identity, however, did not take place overnight and in fact many unionists retained a strong Irish dimension for decades."

You can lead an instransigent horse to water....etc