If anything could have added to the anger excited by this announcement it would have been the fact that the Cabinet Minister was to be accompanied on the platform of the Ulster Hall by Mr. Redmond and Mr. Devlin, and that Lord Pirrie was to be his chairman.  There was no more unpopular citizen of Belfast than Lord Pirrie; and the reason was neatly explained to English readers by the Special Correspondent of The Times.  “Lord Pirrie,” he wrote, “deserted Unionism about the time the Liberals acceded to power, and soon afterwards was made a Peer; whether propter hoc or only post hoc I am quite unable to say, though no Ulster Unionist has any doubts on the subject."[15] But that was not quite the whole reason.  That Lord Pirrie was an example of apostasy “just for a riband to stick in his coat,” was the general belief; but it was also resented that a man who had amassed, not “a handful of silver,” but an enormous fortune, through a trade created by an eminent Unionist firm, and under conditions brought about in Belfast by the Union with Great Britain, should have kicked away the ladder by which he had climbed from obscurity to wealth and rank.  An additional cause of offence, moreover, was that he was at that time trying to persuade credulous people in England that there was in Ulster a party of Liberals and Protestant Home Rulers, of which he posed as leader, although everyone on the spot knew that the “party” would not fill a tramcar.  Of this party the same Correspondent of The Times very truly said: 

“Nearly every prominent man in it has received an office or a decoration—­and the fact that, with all the power of patronage in their hands for the last six years, the Government had been able to make so small an inroad into the solid square of Ulster Unionism is a remarkable testimony to the strength of the sentiment which gives it cohesion.”

But a score of individuals in possession of an office equipped with stamped stationery, and with a titled chairman of fabulous wealth, have no difficulty in deluding strangers at a distance into the belief that they are an influential and representative body of men.  It was in furtherance of the scheme for creating this false impression across the Channel that Lord Pirrie and his so-called “Ulster Liberal Association” invited Mr. Winston Churchill and the two Nationalist leaders to speak in the Ulster Hall on the 8th of February, 1912, and that the announcement of the fixture was made in the Press some three weeks earlier.

The Unionist leaders were not long left in ignorance of the public excitement which this news created in the city.  A specially summoned meeting of the Standing Committee, with Londonderry in the chair, was held on the 16th of January to consider what action, if any, should be taken; but it was no simple matter they had to decide, especially in the absence of their leader, Sir Edward Carson, who was kept in England by great Unionist meetings which he was addressing in Lancashire.