The Scots

The south-west of Scotland, from which many of the settlers came, was a stronghold of radical Presbyterianism. Some of the founding fathers of the kirk in Ulster, men like Robert Blair of Bangor and John Livingstone of Killinchy, were leaders in Scotland of the Scottish campaign of resistance to Episcopacy and Erastianism. Another powerful influence in determining the character of Irish Presbyterianism was the vivid experience of religious revival which accompanied its beginnings in Co. Antrim, anticipating similar experiences on the frontier in colonial America.

The Presbyterianism of the Scots settlers made them dissenters in Ireland, bringing disabilities and even mild persecution - their services of worship, church courts and marriages were deemed illegal, and they had to pay tithes and church rates to support the Protestant established church - and this experience injected bitterness into a people already hard.

The defection to the establishment of many of their gentry, for whom conformity and escape from the discipline of kirk sessions were attractive, increased their sturdy independence and lack of deference to rank and station. Some of Ulster's most distinguished aristocratic families like the Londonderrys were originally Scottish and Presbyterian.

Although many of the first Scottish settlers were killed or driven away in the Irish rebellion of l64l - though nothing like the 50,000 which contemporary propagandists claimed - their numbers were more than replenished by later waves of immigration, particularly after the Williamite victory of 1690. Londonderry rivalled Carrickfergus and Donaghadee as a port of entry. The Foyle basin, known as 'The Laggan', embracing north-west Tyrone and east Donegal, became, with Antrim and Down, the chief areas of Scottish settlement. It is difficult to be precise about numbers; contemporary statistics tend to be overestimates. The combined English and Scots population in the census of 1659 was 40,000. It has been estimated that another 50,000 Scots settled in Ulster during the remainder of the seventeenth century.

Their Presbyterianism kept their links with Scotland alive and strong. Until higher education became available in Belfast in the nineteenth century and they established their own theological colleges in Belfast and Londonderry, their ministers were trained in the Scottish universities. The close links between Irish Presbyterians and their mother church in Scotland led to the appearance in Ireland of the great divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. Seceders of different kinds and Covenanters, who believed that the great Covenants of the seventeenth century were permanently binding contracts with God and could not be modified or set aside, found support in Ireland. Their Old Light Calvinism was more popular with rural congregations than the New Light Liberalism of some Irish Presbyterian ministers. Significantly, in the nineteenth century, when the victory of Henry Cooke's Old Light party in the synod of Ulster, the mainstream Irish Presbyterian body, made union with the Seceders possible in 1840, the new united Presbyterian Church in Ireland took sides with the Free Kirk, rather than with the Church of Scotland in the great Scottish Disruption of 1843. These continuing links with Scotland tended to preserve the distinctive identity of the descendants of Scots settlers in Ulster. A French visitor to Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century described Belfast as having 'completely the look of a Scotch town and the character of its inhabitants shows considerable resemblance to that of the people of Glasgow'. A generation later, in 1839, another Frenchman observed that Ulster was 'the Scotland of Ireland', characterised by the 'ancient anti-catholic prejudice which its inhabitants had brought with them as colonists of James I'.

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