Space and time, the great framework within which we order our experience; the ubiquity of territoriality as the Annales school has shown.

John Bowman: if Ireland as a nation is not what De Valera means by it, then Ulster is not part of the nation.

It is probable that revisionism has not yet reached a wide public.

A northern catholic commitment to an essentially Gaelic metanarrative - one which bore only a tenuous relation to reality by the 1950s - is as significant a problem as the Protestant lack of identity identified by researchers.

there is no specific Unionist image of Ulster, the past being no more than a handful of events (primarily sectarian) which jusify contemporary obduracy. The curiosity of Ulster is that single events - set outside place - substitute for the communality and continuity of the representative landscape.

Gaelic metanarrative glass curtain a foreshortening of time.

If De Valera made certain that northern Protestants could not be integrated within a society defined by the one-nation rhetoric of the 1937 Constitution, the Unionists have been equally successful in ensuring that Northern Catholics cannot be accomodated in a separate Ulster, however politically defined, in which Ulster Britishness and Ulster Irishness might be bound to one another and to Ireland and the UK.

Joseph Lee regards the [pluralist] description of Ireland as a polyglot patchwork as ‘heroic self-deception’.

Therein lies the single greatest weakness of British Ulster; there is no representative Ulster Unionist landscape to legitimate their control of territory in Ireland, a deficiency recognised by those who promote the several versions of a separate Ulster identity which might link together Protestant and Catholic. The Unionists have failed to appropriate Ulster time-space.

The ordered artifact of the Irish landscape has to be redefined so that it might incorporate the Protestant suburbs of Belfast.

Argues [re: enclosure, landlordism and urbanisation] that these landscape elements, estate demesne, big house, improved town or village, occur everywhere in Ireland, and not only in Ulster. The point is that these elements - ubiquitous as they are - were excluded from the representative landscape of Gaelic nationalism as well as from Evans’ Ulster. [MS p.21]

As Foster argues, Ireland needs a new history that can show the varieties of Irishness to be complementary rather than competing. ... the representative landscape needs to be secularised as does the constitution of the Republic.