ABSTRACT
Unionism in Ulster was regarded as synonymous with unionism in the six counties that comprised Northern Ireland, even though Colonel Saunderson, Irish unionist leader between 1886 and 1906 had his family home in County Cavan. The power, money and political expertise of the Ulster business classes, their educational as well as economic and social background, offered a coherence to unionism in Ulster. At a lower level, too, there was in Ulster the Orange Order, staffed mainly by working class men in the towns and cities, and agricultural workers and farmers in their rural areas, which provided common ground for the business classes, landlords and the lower orders to meet, socialise, and band together against home rule. The massive injection of democratisation in urban, rural and county councils offered new areas of contention, especially in Ulster, where unionists had not been obliged to subject themselves to the dismal spectacle of nationalists ruling the roost.
