February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Of course, the Millar Memorial Hall, Markethill, is a far cry from the drawing rooms of Victorian Dublin, but the cultural activities offered within are not so different — traditional music, dancing, literature, even a course in “Plantation Cookery.” I’m not sure what the ingredients of Plantation Cookery are, but presumably you have to steal them.
Then there are the lectures. People are still talking about the lecture Billy Kennedy gave last year entitled “The Making of America — How the Ulster-Scots Created a Nation.” Perhaps Kennedy doesn’t realize that every country on Earth claims it created America, except England, which actually did create America but is too polite to say so. Similarly dubious nation-building achievements are celebrated in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, China. Actually, now that I think about it, didn’t Africans build America? I hear the pay was lousy.
The theme of this season’s lectures, though, will be “The Other Minority — the Protestant experience in Counties Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal.” Oh marvelous, now we’re victims too — I can’t tell you how much I’ve always wanted to be a victim, or how impressed I am by the speed with which the Mid-Armagh Community Network has appropriated “the Protestant experience.”
But, of course, it’s the Ulster-Scots language itself that lies at the core of all this frantic cultural activity. Personally, I can think of no quality more “Ulster-Scots” than plain speaking, so let’s have some, shall we? Ulster-Scots is not a language. It’s not even a dialect. At best, it’s a strong accent. And everybody — absolutely everybody — knows it.
The Ulster-Scots farce reveals Northern Ireland’s world-class capacity for self-deception. The language was first “discovered” during the early 1980s by the famous linguist and DUP councilor Nelson McCausland, coincidentally at about the same time Sinn Fein started playing sectarian games with Irish. In 1995, during negotiations on the “Rights, Safeguards and Equality” section of the Good Friday agreement, claims of 100,000 Ulster-Scots native speakers were listened to in all seriousness by people whose honesty we were relying on to save lives. The following year, the European Office of Lesser Used Languages abandoned a study of Ulster-Scots after failing to find a single speaker in the whole of Counties Antrim and Down. However, this didn’t stop the newly formed Ulster-Scots Agency getting a