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'Ulster-Scots' are an Irish ethnic group descended from Lowland Scots who settled in the Province of Ulster in Ireland, first beginning in large numbers during the 17th century. The Ulster-Scots identification is found throughout Ulster, especially among Protestants, of Scottish descent. Ulster-Scots refer to both the Scottish Presbyterian settlers of the 17th century and the earlier Roman Catholic Scottish settlers such as the Gallowglass. ''"Scots-Irish"'' is the usual term for these same people who emigrated to the United States; ''Scotch-Irish'' is also used to refer to the same people, and is not to be confused with Irish-Scots, i.e., recent Irish emigrants to Scotland.
Ulster Scots are largely descended from Galloway, Ayrshire, and the Scottish Borders Country, although some descend from further north in the Scottish Lowlands as well. Although many would see them as Irish in respect of both their Gaelic and Irish origins, as some Ulster-Scots do, some others may eschew being labeled Irish, to distinguish their identity from that of the Republic of Ireland. Scottish-Irish emigrated to the United States and all corners of the then-worldwide British Empire: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and to a lesser extent, Argentina and Chile in South America.

Contents

History

Culture

Music

Lambeg Drum

Intermingling and intermarriage in Ulster

Micellaneous

See also

References

External links

History

(''see: History of Scotland and Plantations of Ireland'')
Although population movement to and from the north-east of Ireland and the west of Scotland had been on-going since pre-historic times, a concentrated migration of Scots to Ulster occurred mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries. Prior to that the major Scottish settlement in the northern part of Ireland had comprised of Gallowglass, mostly from the Hebrides. The most notable of these were the MacDonalds, who managed to establish themselves in the north of what is now county Antrim over the course of the 16th century.
The first major influx of Lowland Scots into Ulster came in the first two decades of the 17th century. Firstly, starting in 1609, Scots began arriving into state sponsored settlements as part of the Plantation of Ulster. This scheme was intended to confiscate all the lands of the native Irish nobility in Ulster, as punishment for their rebellion in the Nine Years War, and to settle the province with English and Scottish Protestant colonists. Under this scheme, a substantial number of Scots were settled, mostly in the south and west of Ulster, on confiscated land.
At the same time, there was an independent Scottish settlement in the east of the province, which had not been affected by the terms of the plantation. In east Down and Antrim, Scottish migration was led by Sir James Hamilton and Sir Hugh Montgomery, two Ayrshire lairds. This started in May 1606 and was followed in 1610.
During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the native Irish gentry attempted to expel the English and Scottish settlers, resulting in inter-communal violence and ultimately leading to the death of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 settlers and hundreds of thousands of native Irish people over ten years of war. The memory of these traumatic episode and the savage repression which followed, beginning with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and native Irish almost irreparably.
The Ulster-Scottish population in Ireland was further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars, when a Scottish Covenanter army was landed in the province to protect the settlers from native Irish forces. Although defeated, the Covenater army was allowed to remain camped at Carrickfergus for the duration of the war and afterwards many of the of their soldiers settled permanently in Ulster. Finally, another major influx of Scots into northern Ireland happened in the 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ulster. Although a political war concerning monarchic succession and European influence, popular memory in Ireland still recalls the Williamite war in Ireland during the 1690s as the Protestant Ulster-Scots population of Ulster involved in a war against Irish and French Catholics. The Williamite victories at Derry, the Boyne and Aughrim are still commemorated by the Orange Order today, because the Irish Protestant mythos maintains they had saved their community from annihilation or exile at the hands of the Jacobites.
With each influx of Scottish settlers, more of the native Irish and Catholic Scots were dispossessed and forced by the Protestant Ascendancy on to poor land , or to other regions of Ireland. After this point, the settlers and their descendants, the majority of whom were Presbyterian, became the majority in the province. Along with Catholic Irish, they were legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to Anglicans, who were mainly the descendants of English settlers and native converts. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholic Irish, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the Protestant Ascendancy of Ulster. As a result many Ulster-Scots joined the United Irishmen and participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
However, soon after 1798 most Ulster Scots who had supported the United Irishmen were forced to emigrate or reconciled to British rule by their inclusion into the establishment following the Act of Union. Samuel Thompson, the Bard of Carngranny, expressed the position of eighteenth century loyalist Irish people of Scottish descent in the following verse:
:"I love my native land, no doubt,
:Attach'd to her thro' thick and thin,
:Yet tho' I'm Irish all without,
:I'm every item Scotch within.".
With the enforcement of Queen Anne's 1703 Test Act, which caused further discrimination against non-Anglicans, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots migrated to the North American colonies throughout the 18th century (450,000 people from Ireland, approximately half of whom were Ulster Presbyterians) settled in the USA between 1717 and 1770 alone). Disdaining (or forced out of) the heavily English regions on the Atlantic coast, most groups of Ulster-Scots settlers crossed into the "western mountains", where their descendants populated the Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley. Others settled in northern New England, The Carolinas, Georgia, the Ozarks, and various parts of Eastern Canada.
In the United States Census, 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the United States) claimed Scots-Irish ancestry, the author Jim Webb suggests estimates that the true number of people with some Scotch-Irish heritage in the USA is more in the region of 27 million.[1] Two possible reasons have been suggested for the disparity of the figures of the census and the estimation. The first is that modern Americans with some Scotch-Irish heritage may quite often regard themselves as simply having either Irish ancestry (which 10.8% of Americans reported) or Scottish ancestry (reported by 4.9 million or 1.7% of the total population). The other is that most of the descendants of this historical group have integrated themselves into American society to such an extent that they, like English-Americans or German-Americans, do not feel the need to identify with their ancestors as strongly perhaps, as the more recent Catholic Irish-Americans.
In general, while the Scots-Irish in the United States were largely Protestant, most other Irish immigrants were Catholic. The Scots-Irish ability to more easily intermarry with other ethnicities who shared their faith, in a nation where the majority were also Protestant, may have resulted in a greater loss of ethnic identity. In contrast, Irish Catholics had a more limited pool of marriage choices and often chose to marry within their ethnic group to maintain their faith, particularly in urban areas where Irish Catholic neighborhoods would concentrate populations and facilitate matches. In addition, Irish Catholics in the United States were constantly being augmented by a stream of Irish immigrants from the middle of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, which served to steadily re-invigorate the cultural memory of the Irish Catholics already there. No such regular immigration for Scots-Irish occurred after the 18th century.

Culture

Because of the large scale intermingling of the Ulster Scots population with both its native Scotland and acquired Irish, it is difficult to define distinct aspects of Ulster Scots that would distinguish it from either. An example of this being that the Ulster Scots Agency itself points to many of its cultural icons as being from either the Scottish highlands or from Ireland.

Music

In music, there is a distinguishable line between the cultures of the native Irish and the Ulster-Scots living in Ireland. In Ireland the traditional music is focused around the 'pub-session'. This is a regular meeting, often weekly, and is marked by informal arrangement of both musicians and audience, although, Irish traditional music is one of the most influential types of music known to the modern world, and can be heard in some of the Ulster Scots music. Protestant Scottish traditional music is usually informal and close-knit. The most obvious example of this type of cultural event is the marching bands. Here a formal and organised structure is more obvious. Although they play less frequently, these bands meet regularly in community halls to tune their skills. The strong Scottish roots of the Ulster Scots musical scene is evidenced by the continuing popularity during the Marching Season.

Lambeg Drum

One of the real icons of Protestant Marching bands in Northern Ireland is the Lambeg Drum. While most of the other musical instruments are shared between the Ulster-Scots and the native Irish the Lambeg offers the chance of distinguishing the Protestant Marching Bands.
The Drum has a distinctive sound, with the 'tunes' played on it based on Irish hornpipes style.
Although its precise origins are unknown one popular myth is that it is named after the town of Lambeg in County Antrim.

Intermingling and intermarriage in Ulster

A question that has been raised by many historians about the Ulster-Scots is the question of intermingling and more importantly, intermarriage between the native Irish and the incoming Scots. While it is generally believed that the Catholic Scots coming into Ulster quickly were integrated into the Irish Catholic community, whether or not the incoming Protestants married native Irish Catholics is a point of contention between historians and the two communities in Northern Ireland.
Many historians note the intense sectarian feeling between the native Catholics and the Protestant settlers, and have compared it with the animosity between white American settlers and Native Americans, or the turbulent relationship of white Americans with that of African Americans in the Southeastern U.S.
However others contest such claims. Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, author of the book ''Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language'', states that many of the settlers came from Gaelic speaking areas in Scotland and thus would have culturally meshed well with their new neighbours. Also he states that church records show that by 1716 close to ten percent of ministers in Ulster preached in Irish. He claims that such cultural and geographic affinity would have produced numerous conversions and also marriages. In addition James G. Leyburn, author of ''The Scotch-Irish: A social history'', quotes James Reid, a historian of the Irish Presbyterian Church in 1853, that when the marriage ban was lifted in 1610 that it was a "great joy to all parties". James Woodburn, in his book, ''The Ulster-Scot: His history and Religion'', states that the Scots and Irish "commonly intermarried". ''The Handbook to the Ulster Question'' states how the English politicians were quite perturbed how the Scots were ready enough to intermarry with the Irish. Each of these authors have shown sufficient evidence in their claims.
There is a growing ethnic consciousness of ''Ulster Scot'' or ''Scotch-Irish'' ancestry in Australia, the Falklands Islands, New Zealand and South Africa, where both Scottish and Irish settlement took place in the expansion of British rule in these areas. Despite their descendants, if they knew their Ulster-Scot ancestry, were somewhat incorrectly identified simply as "Irish", "Scottish" or "British" for a long period of time, although it should be noted that in America the Ulster emigrants usually called themselves "Irish". And in the turn of the 20th century, several thousands of Ulster Scots migrated to Argentina, where a large British descent community thrives includes Ulster Scots, but not clearly known how many persons of Scots-Irish ancestry are in Argentina. (see Irish settlement in Argentina and English settlement in Argentina)

Micellaneous

Although Ulster Scots are stereotypically thought of being Unionists, there were members of the Ulster Scot community who fought for the Irish Republican Army and were members of the United Irishmen.

See also

★ Anglo-Irish

★ British Americans

★ History of Northern Ireland

★ History of Scotland

★ Immigration to the United States

★ Plantation of Ulster

★ Scots-Irish American

★ Ulster

★ Ulster Scots language

★ Unionism (Ireland)

★ Ulster loyalism

★ William III of England

★ Ulster Covenant

★ Irish Republican Army

★ Republic of Ireland

★ Society of United Irishmen

References

"Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language" by Padraigh O'Snodaigh, Lagan Press, Belfast (1995)
"The Scotch-Irish, A social history" by James G. Leyburn, University of North Carolina Press, (1962)

External links

★ BBC Ulster-Scots Voices

★ The Scot in Ulster: Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population in Ulster (by John Harrison, 1888)

★ ElectricScotland.com Ulster-Scots

★ Ulster-Scots Online

★ The Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies

★ The Ulster-Scots Society of America

★ Ulster-Scots Agency

★ Inconvenient Peripheries Ethnic Identity and the United Kingdom Estate The cases of “Protestant Ulster” and Cornwall’ by prof Philip Payton

★ Promoting Ulster Scots in England

★ Hidden Ulster, Protestants and the Irish language.

★ The Scotch-Irish, A social history

★ The Lambeg Drum in Ireland