Protestant Challenges to the 'Protestant State': Ulster Unionism and Independent Unionism in Northern Ireland, 1921-1939

This article considers intra-unionist divisions in inter-war Northern Ireland, with an emphasis on the antagonistic relationship between the governing Ulster Unionist Party and a number of independent unionists. The article is divided into four sections. The first section briefly outlines the nature of independent unionism in pre-partition Ireland. The second section considers the politics of the inter-war Ulster Unionist Party, with an emphasis on its programme to create and maintain unionist unity. This provides the context for the third section, which examines the political contribution of a small band of independent unionists who stood outside this unity. The final section conducts an analysis of the electoral politics in inter-war Northern Ireland. This reveals that the most heated political cleavage in inter-war Northern Ireland was not the traditional unionist–nationalist battle line; it was instead the intra-unionist divide

Stephen Gwynn and the failure of constitutional nationalism in Ireland, 1919-1921

The Irish Party, the organization which represented the constitutional nationalist demand for home rule for almost fifty years in Westminster, was the most notable victim of the revolution in Ireland, c. 1916–23. Most of the last generation of Westminster-centred home rule MPs played little part in public life following the party’s electoral destruction in 1918. This article probes the political thought and actions of one of the most prominent constitutional nationalists who did seek to alter Ireland’s direction during the critical years of the war of independence. Stephen Gwynn was a guiding figure behind a number of initiatives to ‘ save ’ Ireland from the excesses of revolution. Gwynn established the Irish Centre Party in 1919, which later merged with the Irish Dominion League. From the end of 1919, Gwynn became a leading advocate of the Government of Ireland Bill, the legislation that partitioned the island. Revolutionary idealism – and, more concretely, violence – did much to render his reconciliatory efforts impotent. Gwynn’s experiences between 1919 and 1921 also, however, reveal the paralysing divisions within constitutional nationalism, which did much to demoralize moderate sentiment further

Local Sylow theory of totally disconnected, locally compact groups

We define a local Sylow subgroup of a totally disconnected, locally compact group G to be a maximal pro-p subgroup of an open compact subgroup of G. We use these subgroups to define the p-localisation of G, a locally virtually pro-p group which maps continuously and injectively to G with dense image, and describe the relationship between the scale and modular functions of G and those of its p-localisation. In the case of locally virtually prosoluble groups, we consider all primes simultaneously using local Sylow bases.Comment: 13 page