The Scots

The settlements in Antrim and Down had not exhausted the supply of potential colonists among the Lowland Scots. 'Scot land,' claimed Sir William Alexander, founder of a colony in Nova Scotia, 'by reason of her populousnesse, being constrained to dis burthen herself, like the painfull bees, did every yeere send forth swarmes.' In the Scottish Lowlands there was a surplus both of population and, in some hands, of capital. Scotsmen had been settling in Europe, as far away as Poland, and there had been unsuccessful attempts to colonise the western highlands and islands. Now Ulster, with cheap land on good terms under the protection of the English Crown, offered attractive possibilities for the upwardly mobile and for those who urgently needed to repair declining fortunes or make a fresh start.

Propaganda for the plantation claimed that there was abundant land for both immigrants and the existing population. Many of the latter remained to find that the new order was less oppressive than the old, for chieftains like the O'Neill had had few scruples about overriding the Gaelic traditions which they championed when it suited their own interests. Of course there were also those who resented the arrival of what one of their poets called 'an impure swarme of foreigners, an excommunicated rabble of Saxons and Scotsmen'. They retreated to the forests and hills, finding refuges from which to harass the settlers while waiting and hoping for the restoration of the old order.

The immigrants were well aware that these 'wood-kerne', as they called them, 'do threaten every house, if opportunity of time and place afford'. Some of them were forced to live and work, 'with sword in one hand and axe in the other'. The fact that they established their communities under conditions of continual insecurity, with their settlements threatened with destruction in the 1640s, and later in 1688-9, contributed to their wary, self reliant frontiersmen's outlook. This was to find its permanently evocative myth in the siege of Derry.

It was not race - Scottish planter and Ulster Irishman shared the same mixed race - but religion, which was to separate the planter from the Gael. Not all Scots settlers were Presbyterians; some were Roman Catholics, others were Episcopalians who became bishops in the Church of Ireland. Not all Presbyterians were Scots, some were English Puritans and there are enough older Irish names among later Presbyterians to indicate that some of the exisiting population found their spiritual home in the Presbyterian congregations which the settlers established. Undoubtedly it was the Presbyterianism which the settlers brought to Ireland which gave their communities cohesion and permanence The structures, doctrines and discipline of Presbyterianism contributed to their self-awareness as a distinctive people - a people of God. Terence Brown has suggested that the metrical psalms, which provided the worship song of Presbyterianism, were peculiarly appropriate for a settler people to take as their spiritual and artistic staple. Their blend of agrarian, pastoral imagery with a rhetoric of warfare and survival amidst ungodly enemies must have provided the Presbyterian settlers with an interpretative myth of their own experience in the fertile valleys of their promised land, wrested from the Canaanites.

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From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.