--- title: "Who Does Northern Ireland REALLY Belong To?" description: "Northern Ireland exists because of a century-old compromise that satisfied no one. This video traces how Protestant settlers arrived in Ulster, why partition happened, what drove the Troubles, and how the Good Friday Agreement reshaped politics." url: https://fronts.co/videos/who-does-northern-ireland-really-belong-to.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/who-does-northern-ireland-really-belong-to/ datePublished: 2026-10-22T19:01:20.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-22T19:01:20.000Z author: - name: Fronts Staff url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/ publisher: Fronts type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 8427 --- When it comes to topics, though, we've come here on Homefronts and on our sister-channel warfronts, we really do love a hotly contested international dispute. Today's, though, probably takes the cake. So much, though, that depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers, or whether this place is even a country, or instead, an occupied set of six counties. That's right, ladies and gents, today we're tackling Northern Ireland. This little place is so unusual, because it was never really a fully fledged country in its own right. That sets it apart from the other countries in the UK, each with histories that date back centuries. Instead, it was essentially London's least bad answer a hundred years ago to an otherwise impossible problem. What the hell is to be done with Ireland? Fast forward to today, though, with Sinn Fein, now the largest party at Storm ont, and even the US President weighing in that Ireland should reunify, there's genuine uncertainty as to where this country is headed. And in order to figure that out, today we're going to look at how this mess got started in the first place, and how it's likely to play out from here. Only bad options. Now before we get into today's episode, we should probably clear up some terminology, because there is a lot of forget thrown around here. Broadly speaking, those who want Northern Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom are unionists, while those who wanted to join the Republic of Ireland are nationalists. These identities have also overlapped heavily with religion with unionists, historically being overwhelmingly Protestant, and nationalists being overwhelmingly Catholic. But while religion certainly plays a role in the conflict, the divide was much more about two communities with competing identities than any particular theological disagreement. But we have to go back in time to see how this really got started. Given just how close Ireland was to Great Britain, simply speaking in terms of physical distance, London had long had its sights set on the Emerald Isle. Henry VIII had even declared himself King of Ireland back in the 1500s, but it didn't exactly change much on the ground. That changed at the start of the 1600s, though, after the ground defeated a major rebellion in the northern province of Ulster. It wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the largest, and London was determined to make it the last. The plan they put together called for the creation of the Plantation of Ulster, which would grant land to Protestant settlers from England, and especially Scotland. London wanted a population there loyal to the crown, while many of the newcomers simply wanted land and a better living. The native Irish Catholics who lost their land, meanwhile, were less enthusiastic about the whole thing. The way this is usually presented is an incredibly binary system, with two clearly cut sides, each of which has complete and total unity. For the Irish Catholics, this is presented as a completely unified country being invaded by London. For the British, anyone who was not Catholic was guaranteed to be loyal to the crown. As is so often the case, the reality on the ground was a bit more complicated. Plenty of Scots were themselves Presbyterians who did not get along with the Anglican establishment. All that said, the divisions over land's religion and community were very much real, and as the centuries went by, the original settlers' descendants became rooted every bit as much in Ulster as the native Irish. This is where the question of legitimacy, or who really owns the place, started to get genuinely complicated. It's one thing to present the newcomers to the island, who were there in no small part because of the wishes of the king, as foreign occupiers who had no business being there in the first place. It's another thing entirely to say about their descendants today, given that both communities have been living there for generations, and largely have never known anything else at home. But that's something that will come to play more of a role a bit later. As time marched on, and support for Irish and nationalism grew, the dominant movement wasn't actually calling for independence. Instead, the Irish parliamentary party was pushing for home rule, essentially an early preview of the sort of arrangement that Wales and Scotland would later receive, where Dublin would be granted a devolved government with its own parliament to carry out domestic affairs in a way as sort of fit. While that seems like a reasonable compromise for many Irish nationalists, it landed like a fucking rock for unionists who were overwhelmingly in the northern parts of the island. To them, home rule would be a complete surrender. They were a relatively small minority on the island, but a majority in the UK more broadly. To be handed over to Dublin would make them a tiny minority overnight, and even if there were disagreements in the unionist movement, nothing to them could be worse than that. As home rule began to look increasingly likely in the early 1900s, these northern unionists decided that they weren't going to just sit back and let that hand over happen. In 1912, nearly half a million signed the Ulster Covenant, pledging to resist home rule, and they weren't bluffing. The following year, some hundred thousand of them formed the original Ulster Volunteer Force, or UVF, had begun smuggling tens of thousands of rifles into Ulster in preparation for the sh*t to hit the fan. This put London in an incredibly awkward position. The British government had long been coming around to the fact that holding the entirety of the island was untenable, which was made all the more clear by World War I, though they didn't want to lose it entirely if it could be avoided. But, they went out staring down an armed militia of a hundred thousand people whose entire grievance was that they wanted to remain British. And sympathy for Ulster ran deep in Great Britain too, but when it came out that Westminster was considering using the army should the unionists resist implementing home rule, around sixty British officers indicated that they would simply resign, rather than deploy against Ulster, raising the possibility that the military itself might refuse to enforce the government's decisions. So, yes, like we said, it is hotly contested. A couple of years after World War I had ended, at the height of the Irish War of Independence, the situation was even more untenable. So, if you're in Westminster's position, what do you do in a situation where you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't? Well, that is how Northern Ireland was born. From the outset, its raison de etre was essentially, what else do you want us to do? The trouble with all of this was, of course, that it necessitated someone getting screwed over. Ulster had a total of nine counties, but including all of them would give the new Northern Ireland a Protestant majority of just 56%, which is too close for comfort. So, unionist leadership kicked out the three least Protestant counties of Done gal, Kavan, and Monahan, along with 70,000 Protestants, who found out the hard way that the Ulster Covenant had evidently come with some terms and conditions. This was less popular with Catholics, especially in the six counties who woke up one morning to the news that they were not just in a new country, with Belfast as its new capital, but were now a minority in it to boot. And yet, despite a very rocky start that saw hundreds gild in Belfast alone, Northern Ireland actually proved to be surprisingly peaceful over the next few decades. Now, that's not to say the situation there was good for Catholics, but it was nevertheless a far cry from another war, or the threat of an all-out mutiny by the British Army. But that fragile peace was not going to hold forever. A nation divided. As the years went by, though, the Catholic community grew steadily more fed up with the status quo. Even after all sorts of reforms that London shoved down Belfast's throat after the Second World War, the place was still incredibly lopsided, where much of your future was decided by which side of the divide you happened to be born into. Inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States, Catholics began protesting in the 60s, demanding equal access to housing, employment and voting rights. And it's worth noting that their demands did not actually involve Northern Ireland leaving the UK at all, but given how divisive things were, legitimate concerns of Catholics were seen by many as being a way to smuggle leaving the UK in under the blankets. That paranoia of mutual distrust only grew as more protests became more widespread, including an increasingly heavy-handed response by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the country's police force. If the name is any indication, they weren't exactly neutral on the divide. They were roughly 90% protestants, and their even less popular auxiliary force, the B specials, were effectively 100% protestant. By 1969, things had reached a breaking point. Rats erupted across Northern Ireland, prompting London to deploy the army to restore order. Initially, many Catholics actually welcomed the soldiers as protection against loyalist mobs, but that evaporated fast, and the military increasingly found itself fighting republican paramilitaries. That wasn't helped by the government's decision in 1971 to begin imprisoning suspected paramilitary operatives without trial. It was called internment, and initially targeted Catholics exclusively, even as unionist groups were carrying out violence of their own. Some detainees were subjected to brutal interrogations, and instead of actually ending the IRA, internment only further radicalised the community. Things really reached ahead in January 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march in a city that nationalists called Derry, and unionists called London Derry. There, the paratroopers killed 13 people, with a 14th later dying from his injuries. That day would go down as Bloody Sunday, and was a major turning point. The low-grade civil war, now known as the Troubles, had begun a few years before, but Bloody Sunday was when it started to sink in that this conflict wasn't going away any time soon. And as the conflict raged on, paramilitaries on both sides were responsible for serious crimes. Republicans were responsible for roughly 58% of the approximately 3,500 deaths recorded during the conflict, loyalists for another 29%, and British security forces for another 10%. Civilians made up roughly half the dead, and paramilitaries on both sides of the fray were not shy about targeting and killing civilians. And while those stats give some sense of the scale of the violence, they don't really capture just how divided Northern Ireland had become. Catholics and Protestants often lived in entirely separate neighborhoods, sent their children to different schools, ate at different restaurants, and usually worked at different companies. The country is the size of Montenegro, so there are only so many ways to avoid running into one another, and not everyone subscribed to this level of segregation. But those who abstained were generally the exception rather than the rule. And unlike some other civil conflicts where politicians would at least pretend to be interested in finding a way to de-escalate, many of the parties and leaders here were some of the most hard-line around. On the Unionist side, you had guys like Ian Paisley, who founded the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, to be a more hard-live version of the Ulster Unionist Party, which had for decades been the community's main platform. This guy was known for many things, including being one of the most anti- Catholic politicians imaginable. In fact, when Pope John Paul II addressed the European Parliament in 1988, Pais ley started shouting that the Pope was "the anti-Christ". Paisley was then physically removed from the room. It's probably not a surprise that he opposed just about any concessions to the nationalist side of things. That's not to say that the Republicans were exactly non-violent peace nicks either. The civil rights movement under figures like Ivan Cooper and John Hume was initially peaceful, but the heavy-handed response and complete lack of progress sent a message to hard-line Republicans that they had to up their game, which came in the form of the IRA. There have been many groups with that name, across Irish history, but the best- known one for the troubles was the Provisional IRA, which set up shop in 1969. Sinn Fein, the main nationalist political party, had deep connections to the paramilitary group with leading figures like Martin McGinnis, a future deputy first minister, having actually served as commanders in the organisation. Gerry Adams, meanwhile, was widely accused of being a member of the IRA, though he spent decades denying it. By the 1990s, though, even the people who had been carrying out the violence were having to confront the same lack of results that the peaceful civil rights movement did back in the 1960s. For all the bloodshed, all the arrests, nobody was actually winning the thing. It wasn't even close for either side. The British military presence peaked here in 1972, with roughly triple the number of soldiers who would later serve at the height of the war in Afghanistan. The IRA, meanwhile, had decidedly not kicked the Brits out, however much they might insist that they were just one last blow from it. With a growing sense of exhaustion, leaders from each side increasingly began to explore negotiations. At first, they were pretty limited in scale and scope. ceasefire were declared in 1994, and while not all of them hold, they did ultimately pave the way for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That deal allowed Northern Ireland to remain in the UK, while giving nationalists a legal route to reunification. Crucially, that route wasn't some "pie on the sky" thing that might be approved at half past never. Johnson would be legally required to hold a referendum if reunification appeared likely to win. The two communities were to come together to share political power in the assembly instalment resulting in the creation of the co-equal First Minister and Deputy First Minister. On the whole, it succeeded at putting an end to the bloodshed, but it was not the end of the dispute by any means. Nationalists now had just shy of what they wanted. If they could get a majority, even for a fleeting moment in time, to support reunification with the Republic of Ireland, then they'd have finally got their way. For unionists, though, this put a permanent threat dangling over their heads. Their place in the union was secure for now, but only as long as they could maintain majority support. Hindsight is always 2020 and is easy to nitpix at little things that major deals got wrong after the fact. But on this one, it's difficult to ignore just how much of an existential threat this majority status became. And as time marched on, their anxiety about where all of this was to go from here would only escalate, losing ground. As these anxieties grew, Ian Paisley's hardline DUP was increasingly jockeying to replace the more moderate Ulster Unionist party. It was, after all, the UUP that had championed the Good Friday Agreement and helped get the thing across the finish line, something that won its leader David Trimble and Nobel Peace Prize alongside Nationalist John Hume. But while the agreement might have been celebrated in international circles and political science classes around the world ever since, a growing number of unionists were becoming convinced that they had been sold out. That sentiment wound up being an absolute disaster for the UUP. In the 2003 assembly election, Paisley's hardline DUP overtook them for the first time, and two years later absolutely crushed them in the UK's general election. DUP won nine seats, with the UUP being reduced to just one. Trimble even lost his seat. There are a lot of reasons for that shift, and not all of them involve the GFA, but the majority do, unionists increasingly seem to think that Nationalists were getting concession after concession while yielding nothing in return. Part of the problem here is that when you have such a lopsided state as Northern Ireland, any deal that actually does deliver or needed reform is going to sting more for the community that originally had the upper hand. One of the most significant of those types of reforms was the Raw Ulster Const abulary, which even after all those years remained over 90% Protestant at the turn of the millennium. The RUC was replaced by the police service of Northern Ireland in 2001, along with a decade-long recruitment system that reserved half of new positions for qualified Catholics. Some of the other concessions, though, do seem to have provoked unionists. Hundreds of paramilitary prisoners were released early under the agreement well before the IRA actually disarmed. Thankfully, the group did disarm in 2005, but it's not hard to see why union ists would worry that they were going down a just trust-us-bro approach. As the years went on, other grievances emerged that were harder to dismiss as unionists simply being upset about losing their previous status. Perhaps most obvious was how Northern Ireland went about dealing with the crimes committed during the Troubles, and specifically who was to be held accountable for them. Do you remember the casualty breakdown earlier where British security forces were responsible for roughly 10% of the deaths during the conflict, with Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries responsible the rest? Well, by 2017, nearly a third of outstanding investigations into Troubles-era deaths involved British security forces. There were, of course, many good reasons for the investigations. The British government was legally obligated to investigate killings involving its own forces, especially given that a previous inquiry into Bloody Sunday had largely cleared the soldiers involved. The killings would later be found to be unjustified in 2010 after the Savile Inquiry, but that ruling wouldn't arrive for nearly four decades. At the time, for many unionists, a disproportionate attention still felt entirely one-sided, especially when a majority of the victims throughout the conflict had been killed by Republican paramilitaries. There was, of course, a point to this. The GFA led to convicted IRA members being released from prison, but those who had fled before trial still risked arrest if they returned home, and this was the way that they were supposed to patch over that divide. That was controversial, in and of itself, for the unionists, who saw this as rewarding those who had escaped justice, but was made even worse in 2014. That year, one of those letters actually derailed the prosecution of a man named John Downey over the 1982 Hyde Park bombing which killed four British soldiers. Downey had received his letter in error. He wasn't supposed to be cleared at all, but a judge ruled that prosecuting him after quite literally receiving a get-out-of-jail-free letter signed with love from London would simply be an abusive process. As is always the case when it comes to Northern Ireland, there are two sides to the story here. Nationalists will argue that all this may be true post-Good Friday, but this is making up for lost time. During the troubles, the arrests leaned overwhelmingly the other way. Thousands of suspected IRA members were arrested, nearly 2,000 of whom were interned without trial. Many of those held without trial were sent to the notorious Long Cash Prison, where conditions weren't exactly a luxury hotel. British soldiers who were accused of unlawfully killing civilians were quite unlikely to face prosecution, even in cases where there was compelling evidence of wrongdoing. Even still, the legacy fight contributed to a pretty heavy sentiment in the unionist community that this was an all-give-and-no-take sort of arrangement. Ironically though, the next major political crisis came from a decision that many of the unionists themselves had enthusiastically supported Brexit. Elections have consequences. Given just how fiercely the DUP had been fighting to keep Northern Ireland attached to the rest of the UK, you might expect that they'd be very cautious about anything that could jeopardize that arrangement. And yet, when it came to the Brexit referendum in 2016 on whether the UK should leave the European Union, the party fell head over heels for leave. The DUP does not speak for all unionists, since the original UUP actually supported remain. But still, nearly two-thirds of unionists voted to leave. Northern Ireland, as a whole, however, voted to remain 56-44%. And look, don't worry, we're not going to re-litigate Brexit here. After dominating British politics for years and toppling multiple PMs, there's been enough said on that one for a while. What we do have to talk about, though, is the impact it ultimately had on Northern Ireland because the fallout has been enormous. For nearly two decades, one of the great achievements of the Good Friday Agreement had been making the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic almost invisible, and a return to the hard border from the days of the troubles that featured a British military with checkpoints and watchtowers was practically unthinkable. Once Britain decided to leave the EU, though, that arrangement became a hell of a headache. Either customs checks would have to return along the border with the Republic, which risked undermining the GFA, or Northern Ireland would have to be treated as essentially separate from the rest of the UK. Ultimately, London sided with the latter, signing what became known as the Northern Ireland Protocol. The arrangement, which came into force in 2021, effectively put the trade barrier down the Irish Sea so that goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be treated as foreign. These barriers were eased a bit by a later agreement called the Windsor Framework, but it didn't eliminate them altogether. Trade nuances aside, the DUP had just performed one of the greatest political master classes in history. This, at least to an extent, helped to separate Northern Ireland from the UK in a way that the IRA and Sinn Fein never had. Now to throw a bone to the DUP after all that, the party didn't exactly go into the Irish Sea border situation willingly. In fact, Theresa May, who became dependent on the party after losing her parliamentary majority in 2017, more or less spent her premiership dragging them behind her, kicking and screaming as she went. But, after Boris Johnson's landslide majority surrendered that confidence and supply irrelevant, the DUP was left with very little say on the whole deal. Johnson ultimately finalized a deal that DUP vehemently opposed. All of this really brought home to the Unionists just how up against it they were, and indeed are today. It was bad enough for them to see alleged former IRA members walk free, but it was another thing entirely to feel that they were simultaneously losing their position in Northern Ireland and increasingly in London. That's not to say that the UK wants to get rid of them, but for most people in England, Scotland and Wales, the question of what to do with Northern Ireland is increasingly a distant concern. It occasionally makes headlines when storm and collapses or violence breaks out, but otherwise, it started to become something of an afterthought. In particular, the deal signed with the EU, despite the DUP's opposition, show just how far the Unionists influence has fallen. Keep in mind the country exists because London truly believed back in the early 20th century that outright mutiny in the British army was in the cards if they tried to abandon Ulster, I mean, how times change. Back home things home and looking much better for the Unionists either. In the 2022 assembly election, Sinn Féin actually overtook the DUP to become Northern Ireland's largest party for the first time. Because of the country's power sharing agreement, where each community has a co -equal first minister, this wasn't the equivalent of Michelle O'Neill waltzing into storm and erasing the trickler and declaring it was game over. But it was nevertheless a remarkable shift. He's wanted a fluke either. It was largely repeated in the 2023 local elections, as well as the 2024 UK general election. Northern Ireland's borders had quite literally been drawn to make sure that something like this never happened. It's worth noting that while the Unionists were losing ground, it wasn't exclusively to the Nationalists, the non-sectarian alliance party has emerged as a major force, meaning that neither side actually has a majority. That is particularly important to the future of the country, because while things clearly have shifted on the ground there, it doesn't necessarily follow that Northern Ireland's population is ready to abandon the UK. Looking ahead. And yet, for all the attention that Sinn Féin's electoral victories have brought, there's a pretty major elephant in the room here. The party's success hasn't actually translated to anything even close to a majority backing what they ultimately want. Support for leaving the UK has stagnated, and if anything has begun to back track. In a poll of polls released earlier this month, the Irish Times found that support for remaining in the UK sat up 48%, while joining the Republic of Ireland was trailing in a distant second at 35%. Undesided voters sat at roughly 17%. When you remove the undecided option entirely, they seem to break fairly clearly towards remaining in the UK, 58 to 42. And that new non-sectarian party called Alliance, by the way, is one of the more interesting phenomena to come out of a country that is usually presented as hopelessly and eternally bitterly divided between two communities. Alliance has built much of its success around the idea that the country's future shouldn't be dominated by an endless argument over whether it belongs to London or Dublin, and there certainly is a lot of merit to that argument. Beyond the ballot box, there are signs that there is some foring of tensions between the communities here too. A survey conducted by the University of Louisville earlier this year found that nearly 80% of the country had made friends across the sectarian divide. While figures like that might sound like a huge "so what" depending on where in the world you live, they genuinely are a big deal here. On top of that, three-quarters of respondents in the same survey acknowledged that the other community had suffered during the troubles. Again, it's baby steps we know, but they're still steps away from the precipice. Despite those encouraging statistics, we would be remiss if we'd left you with a picture of a country that was inevitably moving towards reconciliation. The Alliance Party, after a relatively rapid rise in the polls, has seemed to hit a ceiling of roughly 15%. Even though people seem to have moved away from the old identities a bit, actually crossing the political divide when it comes to the constitutional question of which country they want to belong to has been just too tough to stomach. And even where the old divisions are becoming less significant in day-to-day life, that's not to say they're gone for good. Two things in particular stand out as some of the most in-your-face ways of bringing them back to the surface. The annual orange marchers, which, as the name suggests, are a unionist phenomenon, and the enormous bonfires that accompany them, which are a staple of both sides in a oh-so Northern Ireland way. Every July members of the Orange Order, a unionist group, parade through Northern Ireland to commemorate a historic Protestant victory. Most of these marchers take place in unionist neighborhoods without much controversy. But others pass through nationalist ones, and in doing so, becoming credibly heated. For many Catholics, having a Protestant organization march past your house celebrating their historical victory in battle is about as close as you can get to a theological middle finger. This is an ongoing issue here, and not just limited to July either. Just last month, a decision to allow orange men to march through a predominantly Catholic area for the first time in 28 years triggered two straight weeks of protesting, including by Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill, the country's first minister, who, in this case, did want since the arena with those waving the trick-a-law. As for those iconic bonfires, they're not the sort you may be used to elsewhere in the world. Both communities here celebrate by building enormous wood structures, oft entimes several stories tool, putting the flags of the other side on them, and then lighting the whole thing ablaze. Occasionally, they take this even further by including portraits of their rival politicians and even police officers on the structures. The tradition is much more common on the unionist side, but it's not unusual for the nationalists to partake as well. Unfortunately, some people are still willing to take these divisions considerably further than setting flags on fire. While the Troubles era IRA has long since decommissioned, splinter groups, like the creatively named New IRA, have been setting up shop. Earlier this year, the group carried out two attempted bombings of police stations, and while nobody was killed, it was a reminder that political violence has not entirely disappeared here either. But despite all of these reminders of how divided Northern Ireland remains, life there has changed enormously since the days of the Troubles. For decades, which side of the divide you were born on had enormous implications for your material prospects? That's changed a lot. By 2024, Catholics and Protestants accounted for almost exactly equal shares of Northern Ireland's workforce. The country now has a whole host of problems that don't really fit neatly into the old sectarian divide either. It remains one of the poorest parts of the UK, and over a quarter of the working age population is economically inactive, whether they're unemployed, students, care rs, or dealing with long-term disabilities. Housing has become another major issue here, with more than 50,000 families waiting on lists for social housing, 80% of whom are considered to be in serious need of it. And with construction starts way behind where they need to be, it's something that really transcends the old divides. This leaves us with a question of where Northern Ireland will go from here. Unlike other conflicts that we've covered here on Home Front, where things might be a bit more cut and dry, nothing in Northern Ireland is ever so simple. There's also another complication that rarely gets much attention, and it's one that's usually just taken as a given. Unlike independence for Scotland or Wales, which would just become new sovereign states, Northern Ireland would be joining another already sovereign country, a country that it's never actually been a part of in its modern sovereign form. And that country would have to agree to it. Northern Ireland is considerably worse off than the Republic today, which is itself going through a housing crisis. Inheriting six more counties, ones that have long been held up by generous financial support from London is going to cost a pretty penny. Estimates are all over the place in terms of just how much this would cost, but most place the figure between 3 billion and 20 billion euros annually. This seems to be weighing on minds in the Republic too. In a poll last month, 64% of voters in the Republic expressed concern about the potential costs of reunification. On top of that, even if a majority in Northern Ireland do vote to join, it will be in spite of significant unionist opposition, with many of those unions expected to be very unhappy about being handed over. And while a majority in the Republic still support unification, it's fallen to just 59% with roughly 20% undecided. So to our title question is Northern Ireland British. Well, for now, a comfortable majority would say it belongs in the UK, and a good chunk would say it is either British or some combination of British and Irish. That's about as close to a verdict on the legitimacy question as this place is ever really going to get. Where this goes from here, though, will be up to the people of Northern Ireland. Talk of leaving the UK's never gone away, and it almost certainly never will. And for the Nationalists there, they don't have to win today or tomorrow or next year. They just have to win a majority once, and then the answer to our question today is going to be something entirely different. Thank you for watching.