Lest anyone misunderstand, the "800 years of myths" list, right, was not supplied by Marianne Elliott. The information is woven seamlessly into her extraordinary, densely-packed, 600-page work, all the better to ambush anyone suckled on the standard, nationalist myth machine. She takes no joy from it.
This child of a Belfast Catholic father and Kerry mother (born to an RIC man during an IRA raid on an RIC barracks on the Fermanagh border) cannot dismiss myth so casually. Raised in Belfast, in a culture of romantic nationalism, a veteran of the early civil rights marches, she has walked the walk, lived the life of an Ulster Catholic.
"There is a hesitancy in me to undermine the nationalist myth, as much as it sometimes deserves to be undermined, because I know from my own family, how hard lives were sometimes dignified by that. I think it was a necessary crutch. So there still is a little bit of reverence in me towards a lot of things that some of my colleagues in the Republic - quite rightly - are attacking as myths.
"Maybe when some of your family weren't getting jobs, or the housing wasn't great, it was quite nice to think that, oh well, maybe you were descended from a Gaelic chief and had been dispossessed and downtrodden for all these hundreds of years and that really, right would win out in the end. Certainly that's what I grew up with and you know, it allowed you a kind of inverse superiority when you weren't getting it from anywhere else. But you must remember that underneath it all, there is enough truth, a basis for the myths to develop . . ."
Clearly, it was never going to be easy. She took on the mammoth, nine-year task that became The Catholics of Ulster because she had always sensed that "when you're talking about Ulster Catholicism, you're talking about a different animal to say, Catholicism in Munster. In Ulster, it's much more complicated because it's not the imperial power that people are thinking of; it's your Protestant and particularly your Presbyterian, neighbours who, since the Plantation, have been socially in more superior positions."
Resentment and status are the recurring motifs. Simmering, sullen, corrosive resentment, a word that surfaces over and over, down through the centuries to describe the mood of each layer of Irish Catholic society, as each in turn is supplanted by incomers, humiliated by social inferiors, shunted another layer down the social scale.
But the twin obsessions were in place well before that. In the Gaelic system, so many family members had the right to the title that "you constantly had these declining and rising families. It's one of the reasons why so many in Ireland can say, `Oh, I'm descended from this chief or that' - because it's probably true", says Elliott. "This elitism and social snobbery of Gaelic society is frequently overlooked."
Although the Ulster Plantation would not have changed things too much for the ordinary Irish, the real problem was that they found themselves increasingly treated as inferior by this new layer which was suddenly imported and which would be the new leadership. "That's a progressive thing and something that is very dominant in the Ulster Catholic mentality." Misery piled on misery. Even the lower-class Scots Presbyterians and Protestants, fleeing religious persecution and taking refuge here in vast numbers, felt entitled to treat their Irish Catholic counterparts as inferior. "In Ulster, unlike Munster, say, the dispossession was happening right through the social scale so there was a lot more bitterness."
And so the pattern was set. "Attitudes and systems cemented then are what we find exactly today. One of the things I had not appreciated is that if you look at a map of the settlement patterns laid out by the Ulster Plantation - the land reserved for English settlers, for Scottish and for Gaelic Ireland - and a modern-day map of the religious demography of Ulster, you'll find it has hardly changed at all. The conflict zones in south Armagh, south Tyrone, the area around Portadown - all were set in the 17th century."
Yes, the contemporary Irish language poetry about the loss of land and status - now subsumed into nationalist culture - only came from the elite, "but you cannot deny", she insists, "that awful resentment and sense of loss". Yes, the workings of the penal laws and the Ulster Plantation may have been partly misunderstood and consciously used for partisan purposes - but they did happen: "They represented defeat for a way of life and later injustices gave them added value." In a prologue to the book, which she found professionally and personally painful to write, she states: "It is important to recognise that Ulster Catholics have been on the losing side for most of the past four centuries, and that the almost complete loss of the top tier of Catholic leadership then, and progressive loss of land to Protestants from the time of the Ulster Plantation, placed them on a lower social and economic level than most of their coreligionists elsewhere on the island."
She admits that during her research, she was not immune to onrushes of resentment: "I had always felt `I think I know where this is coming from but I think I can rise above it'. Yet when I was reading, I was feeling myself tugged back more and more, because what I was finding had been suppressed in many ways in my own identity. I would never subscribe to the old myths, you know, the 800 years of English tyranny - which is just not true - but I feel a terrible sense of anger that things were allowed to happen that forced Catholics into positions where they were always the underdog.
"I feel that there really were generations of talent lost, that the opportunities weren't there. You must remember that all through the 20th century, although there was a developing Catholic middleclass in Ulster, it was hardly happening. They were coming from such a terribly low base, there wasn't the social leadership that was pulling them out, and it didn't happen until the British education system allowed it to happen."
In ways, her own reaction was surprising. Neither of her parents had ever discussed stories of Catholic victimisation in their children's hearing. Only in recent years did Elliott learn stories her father had told her mother about the B Specials, who routinely targeted young Catholic men coming home from work, particularly if they were wearing a suit, which would be "ripped off them".
Does she think that she came through relatively unscarred? A lengthy pause. "I obviously came out of it knowing when to keep quiet," she says slowly.
The ripping of the suits is just one example of the kind of petty persecution that, more than any great, imperial perfidy, echoes through the centuries and accounts for the enduring bitterness. Elliott came across cases from Penal times where Protestants deliberately placed the blame for cattle-stealing on Catholic neighbours, knowing that Catholics would be "levied" to replace them.
"Baiting business" was how the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor referred to police activities in 1942: "multiplied instances of petty persecution, the perpetual pin-pricks of the `where's-your-identity-card-from-the-same-policeman-fourtimes-a-day' variety".
"Out of that resentment," writes Elliott, "developed a specifically Catholic reading of history, in which the Catholic is always the underdog, the victim. To a remarkable degree Ulster Catholic culture became one of grievance, each new grievance copper-fastening all those which had gone before . . . Ulster Catholics and Protestants had long been equally sectarian, with one very fundamental difference. The latter had been in the seat of power for several centuries." . It is easy to be sanguine about petty harassment at a distance. But it is the petty oppressions rather than outright tyranny which impact most on a community, and pettiness is rarely well documented.