The Scots

It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that the descendants of Scottish settlers in Ulster remained permanent aliens in Ireland. Undoubtedly the original seventeenth-century settlers had been cast in the role of agents of the British interest in Ireland, a role later recognised by the Crown payment of regium donum - 'royal bounty' - for Presbyterian ministers, in spite of the fact that they were dissenters. But if some aspects of their experience in Ireland, as in 1641 and in 1689-90, encouraged them to continue in that role, other aspects made them increasingly dissatisfied with their lot in Ireland. They became opponents, rather than allies, of the English Protestant establishment.

To their disabilities as dissenters were added, in rural areas, the tensions of the landlord/tenant farmer relationship. Most land lords were members of the established church, most Presbyterians were tenant farmers. In times of economic recession, with rising rents and falling prices, life became a struggle for survival. As early as 1636 some ministers led an unsuccessful expedition to colonial America, following the example of the English Pilgrim Fathers. In the 1680s Francis Makemie and other Ulster Presbyterian ministers, mostly from the Laggan presbytery in the west of the province, became the founding fathers of American Presbyterianism. In the eighteenth century what had been a trickle of Ulster Scots emigrants to America became a flood. Thousands, impelled largely by economic motives, abandoned Ireland for the New World. Some of them became determined supporters of the American colonists' campaign for independence from Britain. Their experience and example had important repercussions among those who remained in Ireland. The philosophy of the American colonists - as expressed in their famous Declaration of Independence - that all men had inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had explosive implications for eighteenth-century Ireland.

Such ideas were characteristic of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which was exposing the privileges and injustice of the archaic political and social systems of the old order in Europe to rational scrutiny and criticism. Some Ulster Scots imbibed these ideas as students in the Scottish universities; more as members of popular local reading societies. Inspired by events in America and in France they became involved in a movement for radical reform in Ireland. It was in the 'Scotch town' of Belfast that the first society of United Irishmen was formed in 1791. Its plan was to unite all Irishmen, 'Protestant, Roman Catholic and Dissenter', to achieve revolutionary change in Ireland - a democratic parliament, full civil rights for all, irrespective of religion, and an end to English domination. It was the brainchild of a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, William Drennan, and its first members were sons of the manse and elders of the kirk.

But it was only some of the Ulster Scots who glimpsed the United Irish vision - an avante garde in Belfast and in counties Antrim and Down - and the rebellion which they led in 1798 was as much an expression of long-standing Presbyterian and peasant grievances as a revolutionary crusade. The tragedy of 1798 was that what the United Irishmen intended to be a crusade for Irish liberty and against injustice became a civil war with Irishmen fighting Irishmen. If descendants of Scots settlers fought as rebels in counties Antrim and Down they were also prominent in the ranks of the yeomanry in Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry and Armagh.

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