Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 4

I am Ulster, my people an abrupt people

Who like the spiky consonants in speech

And think the soft ones cissy; who dig

The k and t in orchestra, detect sin

In sinfonia, get a kick out of

Tin cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk,

Anything that gives or takes attack,

Like Micks, Tagues, tinkers’ gets, Vatican.

An angular people, brusque and Protestant,

For whom the word is still the fighting word,

Who bristle into reticence at the sound

Of the round gift of the gab in Southern mouths.

Mine were not born with silver spoons in gob,

Nor would they thank you for the gift of tongues;

The dry riposte, the bitter repartee’s

The Northman’s bite and portion, his deep sup

Is silence; though, still within his shell,

He holds the old sea-roar and surge

Of rhetoric and Holy Writ.

W. R. Rodgers; from ‘Epilogue’ in Poems,

Michael Longley (Oldcastle,

Co. Meath, 1993), pp. 106–7

‘Whatever an Ulsterman may be, he is certainly never charming, and of that fact, no one is more fully aware than the Ulsterman himself.’

F. Frankfort Moore, The Truth about Ulster

(London, 1914), p. 102

‘I’ve changed, you know.’

David Trimble to his old friend, Professor Herb Wallace,

after signing the Belfast Agreement

‘What do you want for your people?’

‘To be left alone.’

Exchange between Sean Farren, a senior nationalist politician, and David Trimble at Duisburg, in the late 1980s