"...more Southern Irish Catholics died in British uniform on the first day of the Somme offensive than participated in [the Easter Rising] ..."

I spent a very interesting day today, with three people I had never met before who (later admitted that) at 10am this morning were fairly sceptical about the overall Ulster-Scots story, but by 5pm were totally convinced and even enthused. I managed to wipe away years of preconceptions just by showing them simple evidences and telling local stories - which just proves the depth of the authentic stories themselves and their power to persuade if reasonably well told.

We live in a time when some old prejudices are hopefully being rethought and reassessed, maybe because the full story is now being told, rather than the narrow, propagandised, selectively-edited versions. In light of this recent story, the headline of this posting is a quote from this article in the Daily Telegraph and I thought some of you would be interested in it. This book - The 6th Connaught Rangers: Belfast Nationalists and the Great War - is an excellent telling of very similar stories and is full of photographs of artefacts which had been kept by the families of the men who served.