The question of O'Donnell the ecclesiastic and O'Donnell the politician are difficult to distinguish, whatever responsibility for the failure of the Convention he bears seem to lie with his ecclesiastic role. The bishops made plain their opposition to a Swiss federal system, under which Ulster would be a kind of Protestant canton, and O'Donnell went to great length to frame a scheme that would exclude any provincial autonomy, which exposed a basic nationalist misunderstanding of Ulster. The ethos of Ulster Presbyterianism is really very democratic, though it would have been most difficult to convince the average Irish Catholic of that fact. Ulster's objection to Home Rule had always been that it would set up not a democratic, but a theocratic state.