Unionists in Northern Ireland must provide determined resistance to any move to break up the UK, Democratic Unionist leader the Reverend Ian Paisley said today.
In a speech to his party's youth wing at Queen's University, Belfast, the North Antrim MP said unionists were facing a number of challenges to the union from within and outside their community.
He told the Young Democrats conference: "We need to organise our resistance.
"There must be no challenge to our union that we do not answer.
"No letter can go unanswered. No betrayer of our union, whether they are in unionism or elsewhere, can go unchallenged.
"We must be the watchdogs of the union. We must marshal the forces of resistance, determined resistance against all that is happening today."
Mr Paisley said unionists were engaged in a fight to maintain the union with Britain and uphold the principles of the founding fathers of the state in Ulster.
He claimed the constitutional position of the Queen was under attack at Westminster and that the history of Northern Ireland was being "slowly erased" from the curriculum in schools in the province.
In a reference to Sinn Féin leader Mr Gerry Adams's remarks two weeks ago in New York that republicans could not force unionists into a united Ireland and must engage in a debate with them on the type of united Ireland they could live in, Mr Paisley said his community would not go down that path.
Recalling a unionist election poster which depicted an Irishman urging unionists to follow nationalists into a bog, the DUP leader said: "Gerry Adams can grow his beard until he is Rip Van Winkle but we will still be saying no to the destruction of the Union. "We will not be going into a bog hole with Gerry Adams or any of his reprobates."
PA