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Ulster is the most northern of Ireland’s four provinces and the only province in which a majority of the population has ever been Protestant. This was attributed to colonization from Britain, chiefly in the seventeenth century, differentiating Ulster from the rest of Ireland and leading to partition in 1921 when six of Ulster’s nine counties remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, but with a hostile Catholic and Irish nationalist minority. The identification of religious and political loyalties spawned violent sectarian conflict, and whereas the main churches are committed to reconciliation, popular Protestantism remains notoriously anti-Catholic.