Since 1968, Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint, he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

The more traditional wing of the Unionist Party had no intention of introducing reforms, which led to three years of frustrated fighting within the coalition both between the National Liberals and the Unionists and between factions within the Conservatives themselves.

Labour had already lost its majority in the House of Commons when he became Prime Minister and lost further seats at by-elections and through defections, forcing Callaghan to deal with minor parties such as the Liberal Party especially in the Lib-Lab pact from 1977 to 1978, the Ulster Unionists, Scottish National Party and even Independents.

New Republican lawmakers were elected by a coalition of white Unionists, freedmen and northerners who had settled in the South.

Thus, Chamberlain had to make the best of a hopeless situation, writing fatalistically that ' I consider the Unionist cause is hopeless at the next election, and we shall certainly lose the majority of the Liberal Unionists once and for all.

Balfour had endorsed cautious protectionism soon after Chamberlain's resignation, but was unwilling to go further or to announce an early general election, by-election results being comprehensively unfavourable for the Unionists.

By now, Chamberlain had accepted that the Unionists were likely to lose the general election, and criticised Balfour for delaying the inevitable.

Although in opposition, it appeared that Chamberlain had successfully associated the Unionists with the cause of tariff reform, and that Balfour would be compelled to accede to Chamberlain's future demands.

In 2005, Paisley's political party became the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, displacing his long-term rivals, the Ulster Unionists ( UUP ), who had dominated unionist politics in Northern Ireland since before the partition of Ireland.

The majority of Liberal Unionists, including Hartington, Lord Lansdowne, and George Goschen, were drawn from the Whig faction of the party and had been expected to split from the Liberal Party anyway, for reasons connected with economic and social policy.

Some of the Unionists held extensive landed estates in Ireland and feared these would be broken up or confiscated if Ireland had its own government, while Hartington had suffered a personal loss at the hands of Irish Nationalists in 1882 when his brother was killed during the Phoenix Park Murders.

By now all chance of a reunion between the Liberals and Liberal Unionists had disappeared, and it was no great surprise when leading Liberal Unionists joined Salisbury's new administration in 1895 following the heavy electoral defeat inflicted on the Liberal party.

It is possible that at this stage Chamberlain could have become leader of all the surviving Unionists ( at least all those in favour of Tariff Reform ) and forced Balfour to resign, but even protectionist Tories were reluctant to choose Chamberlain as their leader, not having forgotten how, as a Liberal, in the 1880s, he had been one of their sternest critics.

Outside Scotland and the English city of Birmingham, many local Liberal Unionists and Conservatives had already formed joint constituency associations in the previous decade.

Though he had joined the Liberal Unionists late on, he was more determined to maintain their separate status in the alliance with the Conservatives, perhaps hoping and wishing that he would be able to refashion the combination under his own leadership at a later date.

As a party that depended on an electoral pact with the Tories to maintain their MPs in parliament, the Liberal Unionists had to at least appear to be also ' Liberal ' in matters not connected with Home Rule including some measures of promoting reform.

After the Unionists had failed to win an electoral mandate at either of the General Elections of 1910 ( despite softening the Tariff Reform policy with Balfour's promise of a referendum on food taxes ), the Unionist peers split to allow the Parliament Act to pass the House of Lords, in order to prevent a mass-creation of new Liberal peers by the new King, George V. The exhausted Balfour resigned as party leader after the crisis, and was succeeded in late 1911 by Andrew Bonar Law.

The rest of the Supreme Court had nothing to do with Merryman, and the other two justices from the South, John Catron and James Moore Wayne, acted as Unionists ; for instance, Catron's charge to a Saint Louis grand jury, saying that armed resistance to the federal government was treason, was quoted in the New York Tribune of July 14, 1861.

Unionists and members of the IPP refused to recognise the Dáil, and four Sinn Féin candidates had been elected in two different constituencies, so the First Dáil consisted of a total of sixty-nine Deputies or " TDs ".

The Liberal split made the Unionists ( the Liberal Unionists sat in coalition with the Conservatives after 1895 and would eventually merge with them ) the dominant force in British politics until 1906, with strong support in Lancashire, Liverpool & Manchester, Birmingham ( the fiefdom of its former mayor Joseph Chamberlain who as recently as 1885 had been a furious enemy of the Conservatives ) and the House of Lords where many Whigs sat ( a second Home Rule Bill would pass the Commons in 1893 only to be overwhelmingly defeated in the Lords ).

The electorate of the area was mixed, and the constituency was not seen as a safe seat for any party ; at the 1929 election Labour had captured it from the Unionists.

Having been disgusted at personal attacks during the 1945 campaign by Tom Steele, his Labour opponent, Dunglass did not scruple to remind the voters of Lanark that Steele had warmly thanked the Communist Party and its members for helping him take the seat from the Unionists.

Two refused to attend, William O ' Brien's dissident All-for-Ireland Party because Redmond objected to prominent Unionists he wished to have invited, and Sinn Féin on the grounds that the Convention would not lead to the Irish Republic they aspired to.

The Irish Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, opposed home rule in the light of what they saw as an impending Roman Catholic-dominated Dublin government.

He strongly believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate completely with the United Kingdom by abandoning devolved rule in Northern Ireland.

Controversy continued over the rival demands of Irish Nationalists, backed up by the Liberals ( for all-Ireland home rule ), and Irish Unionists, backed up by the Conservatives, for the exclusion of most or all of the province of Ulster.

A second problem was that not all Unionists opposed Home Rule to the same degree ; some were hardcore anti-Home Rulers who would oppose any attempt at home rule, others thought it inevitable that the Bill would pass and were simply trying to get the best deal possible for Ulster.

George V of the United Kingdom, who, after pressure from the Unionists, requested that the Liberals put home rule to the test of a general election.

* The Ulster Unionists ' resistance to All-Ireland self-government remained unresolved, and no account was taken of its reservations to what it saw as Catholic rule from Dublin.

While Unionists within Northern Ireland became reconciled to their form of home rule, Nationalists remained alienated from the structures of the state and pursued an abstentionist policy.

On ‘ Ulster Day ’ 28 September 1912 over five hundred thousand Unionists signed the Ulster Covenant pledging to defy Home Rule by all means possible, drawn up by Irish Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson and organised by Sir James Craig, who in January 1911 had spoken of a feeling in Ulster that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the ‘ rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford ( veteran Fenian ) and the Molly Maguires '.

However he sided with the Unionists over the issue of home rule for Ireland and was elected as a Unionist to Parliament for Stroud in 1895, where he was a member of the South Africa Commission ( investigating the Jameson Raid ).

Although he never openly supported the most militant Unionists, who were prepared to fight the Southern nationalists ( and perhaps the British Army ) to prevent home rule for Ireland, contemporary accounts indicate that he probably had prior knowledge of the Larne gunrunning.

The issue divided Ireland: a significant minority of Unionists ( largely though by no means exclusively based in Ulster ), but principally the revived radical Orange Order opposed home rule, fearing that a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics and nationalists would discriminate against them and would impose tariffs on trade with Great Britain.

He returned after the Southern defeat to find Missouri under the rule of a militant faction of Unionists, the Radicals, who soon took over the regular Republican Party in the state.

The number of Scottish seats represented by Unionists ( known as Conservatives from 1965 onwards ) went into steady decline from 1959 onwards, until it fell to zero in 1997.

However, this implication was challenged by the Ulster Unionists and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland which was the state internationally acknowledged as having jurisdiction over Northern Ireland.

Rivers mined with Confederate torpedoes were often cleared by Unionists placing captured Confederate soldiers with knowledge of the torpedoes ' location in small boats ahead of the main fleet.

McGrady paid tribute to Powell, recognising the respect he was held by both Unionists and Nationalists in the constituency.

The 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, which proposed a power-sharing deal, was strongly repudiated by many Unionists and the Ulster Unionist Party who withdrew its MPs at Westminster from the Conservative whip, The proposal was finally brought down by the Loyalist Ulster Workers ' Council strike in 1974.

This mindset was expressed by David Trimble in the following terms: " Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics.

On 9 April, Chamberlain spoke against the Irish Home Rule Bill in its first reading before attending a meeting of Liberal Unionists, summoned by Hartington, hitherto the subject of Chamberlain's anti-Whig declarations on 14 May.

With the Unionists divided and out of favour with many of their former supporters, the Liberal Party won the 1906 general election by a landslide, with the Unionists reduced to just 157 seats in the House of Commons.

The years immediately following the Civil War were marked by conflicts between Confederates and Unionists returning to live in Uvalde County.

Kuechler signs up only German Unionists in his frontier company, and is dismissed by Governor Francis R. Lubbock.

In December 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill suddenly resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Salisbury offered the position to Goschen, by far the most conservative of the leading Liberal Unionists.

Though a few Liberal Unionists like Goschen formally joined the Conservatives ( by becoming member of the exclusive Tory Carlton Club ), the party still continued to maintain a separate identity and to raise their own funds.

Though not numerous, the Liberal Unionists boasted having within their ranks the vast bulk of the old Whig aristocracy as represented by the stolid Duke of Devonshire.

This is opposed by Unionists.

The Scottish Green Party, the Scottish Socialist Party and the Scottish Enterprise Party are most widely publicised, however all independence movements / parties are opposed by Unionists.

Lynch's statement that the Irish Government could " no longer stand by " was interpreted by Unionists in Northern Ireland as hinting at military intervention ( and was misquoted as a promise not to " stand idly by ").