Ulster-Scots

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This article is about a community of Ulster, Ireland. For the emigrants to North America, see Scots-Irish American. For the dialect of the Scots language, see Ulster Scots language.

This flag is the flag of the Ulster Unionist Party and it is incorrect to refer to it as the official flag of Northern Ireland and de facto civil flag. The Official Flag of Northern Ireland is the Union Flag commonly and incorrectly called the Union Jack.

"Ulster-Scots" is a term used to refer to people descended from Scots who live in Northern Ireland in a part of the ancient Irish Province of Ulster in Ireland. For the most part today, many people of Protestant background identify with this grouping, and the identification is also largely restricted to people in Northern Ireland and Donegal, in the Irish Republic. Though the majority are Protestant, some were Roman Catholic such as the Gallowglass. Scotch-Irish is the usual term for these same people who emigrated to the United States; Scotch-Irish is also used to refer to the same people, and is not to be confused with Irish-Scots, i.e. Irish emigrants to Scotland. They are largely descended from Galloway and the Scottish Borders Country, although some descend from further north in the Scottish Lowlands as well. Although many would see them as Celts in respect of both their Scottish and Irish origin, some Ulster-Scots eschew being labeled "Celtic", to distinguish their identity from that of the Republic of Ireland.

1 History
2 Intermingling and Intermarriage
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

Historical provincial flag of Ulster, still incorporated in the Four Provinces Flag.

Cross of St. George and flag of England.

A controversial flag occasionally used to represent the Ulster-Scots.

The migration of non Catholic Scots to Ulster occurred mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries (as detailed in the articles History of Scotland and Plantations of Ireland). The first major influx of Scots into Ulster came during the settlement of east Down, which was led by Sir James Hamilton and Sir Hugh Montgomery, two Ayrshire lairds. This started in May 1606 and was followed in 1610 by the arrival of many more Scots as part of the Plantation of Ulster. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Irish Catholics attempted to expel the English and Scottish settlers, resulting in inter-communal violence and ultimately leading to the death of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 settlers and an undetermined number of Irish people over 10 years of war. The memory of this traumatic episode and the savage repression which followed, poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and Irish Roman Catholics almost irreparably.

The Scottish population in Ulster was further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars, when a Scottish Covenanter army was landed in the province to protect the settlers from Irish Catholic forces. After the war was over, many of the soldiers settled permanently in Ulster. Finally, another major influx of Scots into northern Ireland happened in the 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ulster. Also in the 1690s, the Scottish population of Ulster fought another war against the Irish Catholics - the Williamite war in Ireland. The Williamite victories at Derry, the Boyne and Aughrim are still commemorated today, because many Irish Protestants believed they had saved their community from annihilation or exile at the hands of the Jacobites. With each influx of Scottish settlers, more of the Catholic Irish and Catholics of Scots descent were dispossessed and forced onto poor land, or to other regions of Ireland. After this point, the settlers and their descendants, the majority of whom were Presbyterian, became the majority in the province. However, along with Roman Catholics, they were legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to Anglicans, who were mainly the descendants of English settlers. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholics, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the Anglican population of Ulster. In 1798, many Ulster-Scots joined the United Irishmen and participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

However soon after 1798 most Presbyterian radicals who had supported the United Irishmen were forced to emigrate or reconciled to British rule by their inclusion into the establishment following the Act of Union. Samuel Thompson, the Bard of Carngranny, expressed the position of eighteenth century loyalist Irish people of Scottish descent in the following verse:

"I love my native land, no doubt,

Attach'd to her thro' thick and thin,

Yet tho' I'm Irish all without,

I'm every item Scotch within.".

With the enforcement of Queen Anne's 1703 Test Act in Ulster, which caused further discrimination against non-Anglicans, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots migrated to the North American colonies throughout the 18th century (450,000 people from Ireland (approximately half of whom were Ulster Presbyterians) settled in the USA between 1717 and 1770 alone). Disdaining (or forced out of) the heavily English regions on the Atlantic coast, most groups of Ulster-Scot settlers crossed into the "western mountains", where their descendants populated the Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley. Others settled in northern New England, The Carolinas, Georgia, and various parts of Eastern Canada.

In the United States Census, 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the USA) claimed Scots-Irish ancestry, though estimates suggest that the true number of Scotch-Irish in the USA is more in the region of 27 million.[1] Two possible reasons have been suggested for the disparity of the figures of the census and the estimation. The first is that Scotch-Irish may quite often regard themselves as simply having either Irish ancestry (which 10.8% of Americans reported) or Scottish ancestry (reported by 4.9 million or 1.7% of the total population ) or English ancestry (7.7%). The other is that most of the descendants of this historical group have integrated themselves into American society to such an extent that they, like English-Americans or German-Americans, do not feel the need to identify with their ancestors as strongly as perhaps the more recent Roman Catholic Irish-Americans. Obviously, people of colonial ancestry in America, whether Scots-Irish, English, or other, cannot be expected to be found in any degree of purity in the United States, having become interbred with other ethnic groups over so many generations.

Around 17 US Presidents have been of Ulster-Scots origin, starting with Andrew Jackson and ending with the current incumbent, George W. Bush (see Scots-Irish American for a full list).

[edit] Intermingling and Intermarriage

A question that has been raised by many historians about the Ulster-Scots is the question of intermingling and more importantly, intermarriage between the native Irish and the oncoming Scots. While it is generally believed that the Catholic Scots coming into Ulster quickly were integrated into the Irish Catholic community, whether or not the oncoming Protestants married Irish Catholics is a point of contention between historians and the two communities in Northern Ireland.

Some see it as a question of honor. Some Protestants find it impossible that their Protestant ancestors would consort with their Catholic neighbors, while some Catholics find it insulting that the Scots wouldn't dare to do so. There are arguments to defend both points of view.

Many historians note the intense sectarian feeling between the native Catholics and the Protestant settlers and have compared it with the animosity between American settlers and the native Americans.

However others contest such claims. Padraigh O'Snodaigh, author of the book Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language, states that many of the settlers came from Gaelic speaking areas from Scotland and thus would of culturally meshed well with their new neighbors. Also he states that church records show that by 1716 near ten percent of ministers in Ulster preached in Irish. He claims that such cultural and geographic affinity would have produced numerous conversions and also marriages. In addition James G. Leyburn, author of The Scotch-Irish: A social history, quotes James Reid, a historian of the Irish Presbyterian Church in 1853, that when the marriage ban was lifted in 1610 that it was a "great joy to all parties."