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The Scotspart 6Subsequent Irish history might seem to suggest that Ulster Scot participation in the United Irish movement was only a temporary aberration from their permanent role as supporters of the British interest in Ireland - the one occasion when Ulster joined Ireland. But that would not be the whole truth. There is truth also in the contention that, in the nineteenth century, Ireland left Ulster, that the non-sectarian vision of the United Irishmen was replaced by a Roman Catholic and Gaelic Irish nationalism which excluded the aggressively Protestant Ulster Scots who were beginning to believe that their economic interests were bound up with those of the north of England and west of Scotland in whose industrial revolution Belfast had begun to share. The traditional grievances of the Ulster Scots had been largely removed in the nineteenth century with the destruction of the political and economic power of the landlords and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Their political aspirations were beginning to be satisfied with their achievement of full civil rights. They welcomed the inceasing liberalisation and democratisation of the structures of British politics. They thought of themselves not as Scots but as Irish and British. Two hundred years of Irish soil and climate had made them Irish. Eighteenth-century Ulster Scots emigrants to southern Pennsylvania gave their new townships Ulster rather than Scottish names - Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone. At the end of the nineteenth century J. J. Shaw, a Greyabbey-born academic and lawyer, in an open letter to another Ulster Scot explained why, though proud of his Irishness and of United Irish ancestors, he opposed Gladstone's policy of giving Ireland home rule to satisfy Irish nationalist demands: If you and I are not Irishmen, I do not know who can be entitled to the name. Eight generations of your ancestors and of mine sleep beneath the shadow of the old Abbey walls. These men through their several generations were born and lived and died in Ireland. Every morning they went forth to their work and to their labour till the evening. They spent their days and their strength and their substance on Irish soil. They subdued the earth and planted it. The wilderness and the solitary place were glad for them; and they made the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. There is not a square yard round the places where we were born which does not bear the marks of their industry and care. But their Irishness was not the anti-British Irishness of some of their nationalist contemporaries. A moderator of the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly, speaking not long after Shaw had published his open letter on the Home Rule question, could claim without fear of contradiction: Seldom, if ever, have any of us been ashamed to declare that we are Britons. . . whatever our views of the best solution to the Irish problem, the sentiment of loyalty towards and pride in the British inheritance and commonwealth of peoples has been common to us all. Significantly, his statement has been quoted and endorsed by two historians of Irish Presbyterianism, Ernest Davey and J. M. Barkley, writing in 1940 and 1960 respectively. A majority of the descendants of Scottish settlers in Ulster would still see no contradiction in being both Irish and British. Another moderator of the Irish General Assembly, T. M. Johnstone, was probably right when he claimed, 'If in one sense Ulstermen are Irishmen first and Britishers afterwards, in another sense they are Ulstermen first and Irishmen afterwards.'
Click here for part 7, or here for part 5.
From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print). |
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