Ulster Scots people
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007) |
| Ulster-Scots |
|---|
| Total population |
|
unknown |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland |
| Languages |
| English, Ulster Scots, Irish |
| Religions |
| Protestantism, Roman Catholicism |
| Related ethnic groups |
| Scottish, Irish; Welsh, English |
Ulster-Scots are an ethnic group in Ireland, descended from mainly Lowland Scots who settled in the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. Settlement first began in large numbers during the 17th century during the Plantation of Ulster, a planned process of colonisation which took place in the reign of James I of England. The Ulster-Scottish identification is found throughout Ulster of partial Scottish descent, especially among Protestants.[citation needed] Ulster-Scots refers to both the Scottish Presbyterian settlers of the 17th century and decendents of earlier migrants known as the "Gallowglass", who were predominantly Catholic. "Scots-Irish" is the modern form of the term for these same people who later immigrated to what is now the United States; Scotch-Irish is the traditional form, and is not to be confused with Irish-Scots, i.e., recent Irish immigrants 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 and the Highlands as well. Although many would see them[who?] as Irish in respect of both their Gaelic and Irish origins, as some Ulster-Scots do,[who?] some others[who?] may eschew being labeled Irish,[citation needed] to distinguish their identity from that of the Republic of Ireland. Ulster-Scots emigrated in significant numbers to the United States and all corners of the then-worldwide British Empire—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa—and to a lesser extent to Argentina and Chile in South America.
Contents |
[edit] History
- see also Gallowglass, 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. Prior to that the major Scottish immigration in the northern part of Ireland was composed of Gallowglass mercenary clans from the Scottish Highlands. The most notable[Neutrality disputed — See talk page] of these were the MacDonnells, originally, from the clan Donnell of Ireland and who established themselves in the north of what is now county Antrim over the course of the 16th century.
The first major influx of Lowland Scots into Ulster came in the first two decades of the 17th century. Starting in 1609, Scots began arriving into state sponsored settlements as part of the Plantation of Ulster. This scheme was intended to confiscate all the lands of the Gaelic Irish nobility in Ulster, as punishment for their rebellion in the Nine Years War, and to settle the province with Protestant English and Scottish colonists. Under this scheme, a substantial number of Scots were settled, mostly in the south and west of Ulster, on confiscated land.
At the same time, there was an independent Scottish settlement in the east of the province, which had not been affected by the terms of the plantation. In east Down and Antrim, Scottish migration was led by James Hamilton, 1st Earl of Abercorn and Sir Hugh Montgomery, two Ayrshire lairds. This started in May 1606 and was followed in 1610.
During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the native Irish gentry attempted to expel the English and Scottish settlers, resulting in severe inter-communal violence, massacres and ultimately leading to the death of around 4,000 settlers over the winter of 1641-42 [1]. The memory of these traumatic episode poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and native Irish almost irreparably.
The Ulster-Scottish population in Ireland 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 of their soldiers settled permanently in eastern Ulster [2]. The war itself, part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, ended in the 1650s, with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. With Puritan zeal, Oliver Cromwell re-conquered Ireland. Defeating the Irish Catholic forces on behalf of the English Commonwealth, he and his forces employed methods and inflicted casualties among the civillian Catholic population that were long commonly considered by historians and the popular culture to be outside of the accepted military ethics of the day (see more on the debate here). This outcome resulted in an increased fear and resentment on the part of the native Catholic Irish that lasted generations. Under the Act of Settlement 1652, all Catholic owned land was confiscated and the Plantations, which had been destroyed by the rebellion of 1641, were restored. However due to the Scots' enmity to the English Parliament in the final stages of the English Civil War, English settlers rather than Scots were the main beneficiary of this scheme.
There was a generation of calm in Ireland thereafter until another civil war broke out, again on ethnic and religious lines, in 1689. Williamite war in Ireland (1689-91) was fought between Jacobites who supported the restoration of the Catholic James II to the throne of England and Williamites, who supported the Protestant William of Orange. The Protestant Ulster community, including the Scots, fought on the Williamite side in the war against Irish Catholics and their French allies. The fear of a repeat of the massacres of 1641 and of religious persecution under a Catholic monarch, as well as a wish to hold onto lands that had been confiscated from Catholic landowners were their principle motivating factors.
The Williamite forces, composed of British, Dutch and Danish as well as Ulster troops, ended Jacobite resistance by 1691, confirming the Protestant monopoly on power in Ireland. Their 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.
Finally, another major influx of Scots into northern Ireland occurred in the late 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ulster [3].
It was only after the 1690s that Scottish settlers and their descendants, the majority of whom were Presbyterian, gained numeric superiority in Ulster. Along with Catholic Irish, they were legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to Church of Ireland members (the state church), who were mainly the descendants of English settlers and native converts. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholic Irish, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the ruling Protestant Ascendancy of Ulster.
With the enforcement of Queen Anne's 1703 Test Act, which caused further discrimination against all who did not participate in the State Church (Church of Ireland and/or the Church of England), considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots migrated to the North American colonies throughout the 18th century.
Towards the end of the 18th century many Ulster-Scots Presbyterians ignored religious differences and, along with many Catholic Irish, joined the United Irishmen and participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 in support of republican and egalitarian ideals.
[edit] Scots-Irish / Ulster Scots
 |
This section does not cite any references or sources. (April 2008) Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
The term Irish-American is one of some controversy. It it claimed with a large body of evidence[citation needed] that of the estimated 44.1 million Irish-Americans that up to 27 million are actually Scots-Irish / Ulster Scots.[citation needed] Although technically still from Ireland they are mainly descendants of Protestant Presbyterians from what is today's Northern Ireland. The term Scotch-Irish or Scots-Irish is an Americanism,[citation needed] used to separate the Protestant Irish Presbyterian migration to the Americas in the mid to late 18th century from the later Irish Catholic migration of the 19th century. British historians and today's Ulster Protestants rarely use the term and favor what they consider the more correct term of Ulster-Scot.[citation needed] It can be said[weasel words] that because of the lack of emphasis upon origins of the Scotch Irish people,[citation needed] their desire and intent to be Americans, they did not have any great consciousness of their history[citation needed] and so many simply refer to themselves as Irish-Americans.
In the United States Census of 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.[4][5][6] Two possible reasons have been suggested for the disparity of the figures of the census and the estimation. Modern Americans with some Scots-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).
In general, while the Scots-Irish in the United States were largely Protestant, most other Irish immigrants were Catholic. The ability of the Scots-Irish to more easily intermarry with other ethnicities who shared their faith, in a nation 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 Irish immigrants from the middle of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, which served to regularly re-invigorate the cultural memory of the Irish Catholics already there. No such recurring immigration for Scots-Irish occurred after the 18th century.
[edit] Culture
Because of the large scale intermingling of the Ulster Scots population with both its native Scotland and acquired Irish, it is difficult to define distinct aspects of Ulster Scots that would distinguish it from either. An example of this being that the Ulster Scots Agency itself points to many of its cultural icons as being from either the Scottish highlands or from Ireland.
[edit] Music
In music, there is a distinguishable line between the cultures of the native Irish and the Ulster-Scots living in Ireland. In Ireland the traditional music is focused around the 'pub-session'. This is a regular meeting, often weekly, and is marked by informal arrangement of both musicians and audience, although, Irish traditional music is one of the most influential types of music known to the modern world, and can be heard in some of the Ulster Scots music. Protestant Scottish traditional music is usually informal and close-knit. The most obvious example of this type of cultural event is the marching bands. Here a formal and organised structure is more obvious. Although they play less frequently, these bands meet regularly in community halls to tune their skills. The strong Scottish roots of the Ulster Scots musical scene is evidenced by the continuing popularity during the Marching Season.
[edit] Lambeg Drum
One of the real icons of Protestant marching bands in Ireland is the Lambeg drum. While most of the other musical instruments are shared between the Ulster-Scots and the native Irish, the Lambeg offers the chance of distinguishing the Protestant marching bands.
The drum has a distinctive sound, with the 'tunes' played on it based on Irish hornpipes style. Although its precise origins are unknown one popular myth is that it is named after the town of Lambeg in County Antrim.
[edit] Intermingling and intermarriage in Ulster
A question that has been raised by many historians[who?] about the Ulster-Scots is the question of intermingling and more importantly, intermarriage between the native Irish and the incoming Scots.
However others contest such claims. Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, author of the book Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language, states that many of the settlers came from Gaelic speaking areas in Scotland and thus would have culturally meshed well with their new neighbours. Also he states that church records show that by 1716 close to 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". James Woodburn, in his book, The Ulster-Scot: His history and Religion, states that the Scots and Irish "commonly intermarried". The Handbook to the Ulster Question states how the English politicians were quite perturbed how the Scots were ready enough to intermarry with the Irish. Each of these authors have shown sufficient evidence in their claims.
There is a growing ethnic consciousness of Ulster Scot or Scotch-Irish ancestry in Australia, the Falklands Islands, 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" or "Scotch-Irish".
[edit] See also
[edit] References
"Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language" by Padraigh O'Snodaigh, Lagan Press, Belfast (1995) "The Scotch-Irish, A social history" by James G. Leyburn, University of North Carolina Press, (1962)
- ^ Jane Kenyon, Jane Ohlmeyer, The Civil Wars, A military History of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638-1660, p.74
- ^ Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 562
- ^ [1][2]
- ^ Why You Need To Know The Scotch-Irish
- ^ Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
- ^ Scots-Irish By Alister McReynolds, writer and lecturer in Ulster-Scots studies
[edit] External links
- BBC Ulster-Scots Voices
- The Scot in Ulster: Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population in Ulster (by John Harrison, 1888)
- Immigrant Servants Database
- ElectricScotland.com Ulster-Scots
- Ulster-Scots Online
- The Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies
- The Ulster-Scots Society of America
- Ulster-Scots Agency
- Inconvenient Peripheries Ethnic Identity and the United Kingdom Estate The cases of “Protestant Ulster” and Cornwall’ by prof Philip Payton
- Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language.
- Ulster History timeline, Siege of Londonderry Database, Scotch Irish Migration and surname lists
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
