In Northern Ireland, names matter.

What name you use for our second largest city. Whether you refer to a peace agreement signed in Belfast, or on Good Friday. Whether you live in ‘the North’ and day trip to ‘the South’, or hail from ‘Northern Ireland’, that happens to share a border with ‘the Republic’.

In this corner of the world, names indicate your chosen allegiance or designated affiliation.

Given this, UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s emphasis on the “full title” of her party, while speaking in Belfast last week, was somewhat curious.

Opening her address Mrs May reminded people “that the full name of [her] political party is the Conservative and Unionist Party,” before going on to describe the “profound significance” of that name as a symbol of a “central tenet” of conservative political philosophy, namely, a belief in the “precious” Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The substance of that Union, the Prime Minister characterised as “our sense of community and shared values … our diversity and tolerance.”

Growing up in Belfast, these are not quite the connotations of ‘the Union’ that I have come to understand.

Leaving neologisms aside for now, Mrs May’s perception was undoubtedly true. The Conservative and Unionist Party name is certainly one of profound significance, perhaps even more than she realised.

Confidence and supply agreements and its persistent instability notwithstanding, the party that holds the reigns of government in Westminster can be variously referred to as: the Tory, Conservative or Conservative and Unionist Party.

The term with the longest history is the shorthand, ‘Tory’, which dates back to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. During the reign of Charles II two factions emerged in Parliament: those who wanted to exclude Charles’s Catholic brother James from the line of succession were called ‘the Whigs’; those who supported James’s claim to the throne were called ‘the Tories’.

Both terms were used pejoratively. ‘Whig’ deriving from an old word for country bumpkin and ‘Tory’ from the Gaelic tóraidhemeaning thief or outlaw. Use of the term tóraidhe, then Tory, in common parlance developed out of a reference to Irish men and women who rebelled against English rule.

‘Conservatives’ developed later as a term for the party. Its first use is attributed to John Wilson Croker who in a Quarterly Review article in 1830 used it as a means of description for the political grouping that had grown from the initial ‘Tories’. Reinterpretation of key elements of the old Tory tradition occurred under the leadership of Sir Robert Peel who effectively modernized the party stressing support for both social reform and free trade.

The last adage to the Tories’ triptych of titles came in the early 20thcentury when the then Conservative Party allied with one faction of the Liberal Party – Liberal Unionists – who opposed the policy of Home Rule in Ireland put forward by the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone.

While this short tale of lineage is nearly complete, there is one more curious chapter. Under David Cameron’s premiership the Conservative Party applied to the Electoral Commission to change the party’s primary name in Great Britain from ‘Conservative Party’ to ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’ in March 2016. Authorised in time for the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’ to appear on the ballot for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the decision also came just days after Mr Cameron announced the date for the UK’s referendum on EU membership.

Viewed in this historical light, there is not a little irony in the Prime Minister’s remarks in Belfast. The profoundly significant full title of the Conservative and Unionist Party is less an indication of patriotic solidarity between the regions, more a reflection of forced nature of that “precious, precious bond.”