February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The whole Scots-Irish phenomenon has been underplayed in Irish America for far too long. It is an intrinsic part of a great story, it’s thunderous opening chapter, but one that has only lately been making inroads in the popular imagination.
Parade Magazine, inserted in many Sunday newspapers around the country, recently featured the Scots-Irish epic on its cover.
And there is an excellent book currently on the shelves just waiting for a warm Christmas stocking.
“Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America” (Broadway Books) is written by James Webb, a navy secretary in the Reagan administration.
“IF” has it on the best authority that the Webb tome is a fascinating read.
The cover of the book features such famous Scots-Irish Americans as Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, George Patton and, well, Ronald Reagan, a good man to flag from a sales point of view.
The Gipper, it turns out, was Scots-Irish on his mother’s side.
Another outstanding book is “Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan,” a study of early Irish migration to North America — early in this case being the period 1675-1815.
This book, which includes the text of numerous letters sent back across the Atlantic by those early arrivals, is co-authored by David Doyle, Arnold Schrier, Bruce Boling and Kerby Miller, a leader in the field of Irish immigration studies.
The emergence of the story of the Scots-Irish into sharper focus is an especially welcome development because it is an example of how a people can wear a badge of ethnic heritage with pride but not let it get in the way of a greater sense of nationality, one that is shared with people of other ethnic backgrounds.
Herein lies much of what has bedeviled the wee North in recent years where differing religious affiliation has been used to prop up a dubious creed based on the notion that Ulster is not so much a region of Ireland but a geographic term behind which stands a group of people with a nationality entirely distinct from others on the island, specifically the Irish.
This notion of an Ulster nationality is fleshed out on the Orange Order Web site, which includes a link to a page explaining “The Ulster Nationality.”
The link states that there are two peoples on the island of Ireland and then sets out to explain their supposedly differing characteristics.
What follows is a generalized mishmash bordering on race theory: “The Irish are more musical, literary and artistic. Ulster people are more prone to industry than the arts,” it states.
“The Irish are more confident vocally — they are more assertive in conversation than Ulster people, who are more blunt of speech. The Irish are more opinionated and confident; Ulster people are more reserved and shy to give opinions.
“The Irish are more superstitious; Ulster people less so. The Irish are more sensitive to criticism; Ulster people do not care for other peoples’ opinions and what people think of them.
“Morally issues for the Irish often appear to be ambivalent or grey areas; for Ulster people things are more black and white. The Ulster people have a very independent streak and are more egalitarian in outlook, the Irish are more hierarchical — religion does play a part in these relative outlooks.
“The Irish are more romantic and emotional — politically the heart often rules the head (e.g. the swift political swing to Republicanism after the executions following the 1916 Easter Rising by the Irish against British rule).
“Ulster people are more practical, level headed and non-emotional. The Irish would tend to be more frivolous financially, Ulster people more canny. The Ulster and Irish peoples play different sports historically (the Irish ‘Gaelic’ games of hurley and Gaelic football). They have different folk traditions in music [Irish Folk — bohran, tin whistle and Ulster / Orange Ballads — fife (flute), drum (lambeg), bagpipe, brass and accordion].
“There are different dance traditions and the two peoples have different languages.
“Therefore they are separate peoples and whilst due to geographical proximity may share common features, they are as separate as Norwegians and Swedes or Spanish and Portuguese and no-one would argue these should unite as they share a geographical land mass.”
Interestingly, the study by Kerby Miller and his colleagues (Oxford University Press, 2003) rejected the Ulsterization thesis entirely.
They state in the preface: “Since the choice of names for Ireland’s inhabitants is often freighted with political significance, we must explain that we employ the term Irish, without quotation marks, simply to designate any or all of Ireland’s inhabitants and emigrants.
“Likewise, we use the term Scots-Irish, also without quotation marks, as purely descriptive of Presbyterians, in Ulster and in North America, whose ancestors had migrated from Scotland to Ireland. We eschew the group descriptive Ulster Scots because its modern usage [primarily in Northern Ireland] implies a degree of ethnic continuity and exclusivity, from the 1600s to the present, that cannot be supported by historical evidence.”
The irony in all this separate nationality stuff is that Scotland would not have a recognizable national existence in the first place without the Irish.
According to the Tormont Webster Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, “The Scots themselves were emigrants from Ireland, who together with the native Picts and with emigrants from Scandinavia had formed a kingdom by the 9th century.”
What goes around comes around — unless we’re talking about the wee North, where some things are inclined to get well and truly stuck in time and space.
But back to Tourism Ireland and its laudable mission aimed at inspiring North America’s Scots-Irish to kiss the Giant’s Causeway as well as the Blarney Stone.
It’s an idea with clear potential. Anyone familiar with St. Patrick’s Day parades or Irish festivals in this country is aware of an easy and evident fusion of Irish and Scottish cultural symbols.
This fusion survives, indeed thrives, in a purely cultural context. It does not need to wrap itself in the flag of another nationality in order to feel secure about itself. It is, in fact, quite unmistakably American.