Ulster-Scots

Ulster-Scots is a term used to refer to people descended from Scots who settled in the Province of Ulster in Ireland, first beginning in large numbers during the 17th century. For the most part today, many people of Protestant background identify with this grouping,^{[citation needed]} and the identification is also largely restricted to people in Northern Ireland and Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland.^{[citation needed]} Though the majority are Protestant,^{[citation needed]} a minority were Roman Catholic such as the Gallowglass. "Scotch-Irish" is the usual term for these same people who emigrated to the United States; Scots-Irish is also used to refer to the same people, and is not to be confused with Irish-Scots, i.e. recent Irish emigrants to Scotland.

Ulster Scots are largely descended from Galloway, Ayrshire, 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, as some Ulster-Scots do, some others may eschew being labeled "Celtic",^{[citation needed]} to distinguish their identity from that of the Republic of Ireland. Scotch-Irish emigrated to the United States and all corners of the then-worldwide British Empire: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and to a lesser extent, Argentina and Chile in South America.

History

(see: History of Scotland and Plantations of Ireland)

Although population movement to and from the north-east of Ireland and the west of Scotland had been on-going since pre-historic times, a concentrated migration of Scots to Ulster occurred mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries. 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, the native Irish gentry 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 ten years of war.^{[citation needed]} The memory of this traumatic episode and the savage repression which followed, beginning with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and native Irish 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 native Irish forces. After the war was over, many of the Coventer soldiers settled permanently in Ulster.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} Although a political war concerning monarchic successiion and European influence, popular memory in Ireland still recalls the Williamite war in Ireland during the 1690s as the Protestant Scottish population of Ulster involved in a war against Irish and French Catholics. The Williamite victories at Derry, the Boyne and Aughrim are still commemorated by the Orange Order today, because the Irish Protestant mythos maintains they had saved their community from annihilation or exile at the hands of the Jacobites.

With each influx of Scottish settlers, more of the native Irish and Catholic Scots were dispossessed and forced by the Protestant Ascendancy onto poor land , or to other regions of Ireland.^{[citation needed]} After this point, the settlers and their descendants, the majority of whom were Presbyterian, became the majority in the province. Along with Catholic Irish, 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 native Catholic Irish, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the Protestant Ascendancy of Ulster. As a result 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.^{[citation needed]} 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, 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)^{[citation needed]} settled in the USA between 1717 and 1770 alone). Disdaining (or forced out of) the heavily English regions on the Atlantic coast,^{[citation needed]} most groups of Ulster-Scot(ch) settlers crossed into the "western mountains", where their descendants populated the Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley.^{[citation needed]} Others settled in northern New England, The Carolinas, Georgia, the Ozarks, and various parts of Eastern Canada.

In the United States Census, 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the United States) claimed Scots-Irish ancestry, the author Jim Webb suggests estimates that the true number of people with some Scotch-Irish heritage 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 modern Americans with some Scotch-Irish heritage 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). 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 perhaps, as the more recent Catholic Irish-Americans.

In general, while the Scots Irish in the United States were largely Protestant, most other Irish immigrants were Catholic. The Scots-Irish ability to more easily intermarry with other ethnicities who shared their faith, in a a country where the majority were also Protestant, may have resulted in a greater loss of ethnic identity. In contrast, Irish Catholics had a more limited pool of marriage choices and often chose to marry within their ethnic group to maintain their faith, particularly in urban areas where Irish Catholic neighborhoods would concentrate populations and facilitate matches. In addition, Irish Catholics in the United States were constantly being augmented by a stream of immigrants from the middle of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, which served to steadily re-invigorate the cultural memory of the Irish Catholics already there. No such regular immigration for Scots-Irish occurred after the 18th century.

Intermingling and Intermarriage in Ulster

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 incoming 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 incoming Protestants married native Irish Catholics is a point of contention between historians and the two communities in Northern Ireland.^{[citation needed]}

Many historians note the intense sectarian feeling between the native Catholics and the Protestant settlers, and have compared it with the animosity between white American settlers and Native Americans, or the turbulent relationship of Scotch-Irish Americans with that of African Americans in the Southeastern U.S.^{[citation needed]}

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 have culturally meshed well with their new neighbors. Also he states that church records show that by 1716 close to ten percent of ministers in Ulster preached in Irish¹. 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."

There's a growing ethnic consciousness of Ulster Scot or Scotch-Irish ancestry in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where both Scottish and Irish settlement took place in the expansion of British rule in these areas. Despite their descendants, if they knew their Ulster-Scot ancestry, were somewhat incorrectly identified simply as "Irish", "Scottish" or "British" for a long period of time, although it should be noted that in America the Ulster emigrants usually called themselves "Irish". And in the turn of the 20th century, several thousands of Ulster Scots migrated to Argentina, where a large British descent community thrives includes Ulster Scots, but not clearly known how many persons of Scots-Irish ancestry are in Argentina. (see Irish settlement in Argentina and English settlement in Argentina)^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Anglo-Irish
• British Americans
• History of Northern Ireland
• History of Scotland
• Immigration to the United States
• Plantation of Ulster
• Scots-Irish American
• Ulster
• Ulster Scots language
• Unionism (Ireland)
• Ulster loyalism
• William III of England
• Ulster Covenant

References

Wikipedia information about Ulster-Scots This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ulster-Scots". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.