You look up from the massive iron gates on the busy highway below to the Stormont Parliament building standing above you, exactly one mile from gate to front door, it is said. On either side of the driveway up are imposing lawns and lines of trees. Just short of the building itself is the statue of Edward Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn, the man who led the Ulster Provisional Government for a decade, and then went back to England. Out of the blue, said a friend who had recently spent some time there, a letter came from a man in England who is contemplating writing something about Carson and the birth of Northern Ireland and thought that this friend might be able to help in some way. The recipient had read the standard three-volume life by Marjoribanks and Colvin. And he had an uncle who had stood on the Cave Hill on November 22nd, 1932, when the then Prince of Wales had officially opened the new Parliament Houses, and remembered, he claimed, the glow in the sky from searchlights or bonfires or both from across the Lough. Carson was there at Stormont, indeed, and a year later for the unveiling of his statue.
Then he took down from his shelves a book, Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement, by St John Ervine, published in 1915. "Sir Edward Carson is a stage Irishman .. . He has a touch of Samuel Lover's Handy Andy in him. He is the last of the Broths of a Boy. He is the most notable of the small band of Bedadderers and Bejabberers left in the world; the final Comic Irishman, leaping onto the music hall stage or the political platform ... `is there e'er a man in all the town dare tread on the tail of my coat?' " And more of the same.
On September 24th, 1913, the Ulster Provisional Government was established in Belfast, with Carson as President. Two months later Eoin Mac Neill founded the Irish Volunteers. Has the question been adequately answered as to why Carson suddenly, it seemed, stepped out of the Irish picture in 1921. "Gently repulsing the entreaties of his friends," write his biographers, "he proposed that Sir James Craig should succeed him." On February 4th 1921, Carson said: "I have been your leader for some 11 years. I don't believe any leader has ever had such confidence reposed in him for so long a time, so much love and affection."
He gave them his advice on parting. "From the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority. Let them take care to win all that was best among those who had been opposed to them in the past: while maintaining intact their own religion, let them give the same rights to the religion of their neighbours." We know the rest of the story.