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The Scotspart 7What has been the contribution of Scottish immigrants to Ireland? Like other peoples, the Ulster Scots have a somewhat self-admiring historical myth about their contribution to Irish life. There were echoes of it in the words I have quoted from J. J. Shaw but it was enunciated resonantly by the Reverend Henry Cooke, one of its most eloquent exponents, addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1836: Our Scottish forefathers were planted in the most barren portions of our lands - the most rude and lawless of the provinces - Scottish industry has drained its bogs and cultivated its barren wastes; substituted towns and cities for its hovels and clachans and given peace and good order to a land of confusion and blood. Like most such myths it contains elements of truth, as does the alternative Irish nationalist myth which portrays the Scots as greedy robbers of the best Irish land. Scots immigrants have stamped their personality upon much of Ulster and have penetrated to all parts of Ireland. Scottish influence is still audible in some Ulster dialects and a vocabulary loaded with words like 'skunner', 'gunk', 'sleekit' and 'girn'. Scottish industry has brought prosperity to parts of Ulster but not to its bogs and barren wastes. The Scots did not introduce any revolutionary agricultural methods or implements though their two-eared Scotch spade gave the Irish the expression 'digging with the wrong foot'. Later came Scotch carts, ploughs and threshing machines. When the north-east of Ireland was relatively prosperous there were those who attributed that prosperity, and the success of the industries which provided it, to the Calvinism and special talents of the descendants of Scots settlers. Less is heard of such ideas in a period of economic decline. Geography and the emergence of entrepreneurs of genius like Harland and Wolff neither of them Ulster Scots - had more to do with nineteeth-century industrial success than religion or race. Yet, as a modern Scottish historian has observed, 'it is impossible not to suspect that Calvinist seriousness of purpose had some effect on both intellectual and economic life'. As well as good farmers and businessmen the Ulster Scots have produced good doctors, teachers, preachers and engineers. If they have produced little great literature, their eighteenth-century vernacular poets can stand comparison with Burns himself. Perhaps inevitably, their best writers and scholars, like Helen Waddell and Lord Kelvin, have found fame outside Ireland. Their good grammar schools and Belfast's university, which, in its early days, owed much to Scottish models, reflect their respect for education. They have built neat, functional homes but few fine buildings, though John Wesley described the meeting-house of Belfast's First Presbyterian congregation as 'the completest place of public worship I have ever seen'. Commonly caricatured as a gloomy and silent bigot, the Ulster Scot is recognised by those who know him well as a loyal friend with a mordant sense of humour, critical of human pretensions and self-importance. He has not, as Henry Cooke claimed, 'brought peace and good order to a land of confusion and blood'; instead he has contributed his share to disharmony and conflict in Ireland, if only because he cannot compromise what he believes to be sacred principle, which others may see as self-interest. It may be significant that when, earlier this century, he sought a symbol with which to focus and express his opposition to Irish Home Rule, he found it in the great Scottish Covenants of the seventeenth century, originally devised to safeguard the purity of the Reformation in Scotland and in the British Isles. History and geography have combined to make Ulster as much a Scottish as an Irish province. Click here for part 6, or here to go to the start of the article.
From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print). |
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