Speaking about Northern Ireland in 1922, Winston Churchill expressed bewilderment that the radical transformation that had taken place across Europe as a result of the first world war had done nothing to change the basic terms of dispute in the region:
Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed … The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs … all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.
