Ulster-Scots

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Note: this article is about the people of Ulster, Ireland. For the emigrants to North America, see Scots-Irish American. For the dialect, see Ulster Scots language.

"Ulster-Scots" is a term used to refer to the Presbyterians descended from people of the borderlands of England and Scotland who live in Ulster, Ireland. "Scotch-Irish" is the usual term in the United States; in the last few years, "Scots-Irish" is also used to refer to the same people. Since, in the first wave, they come from the lands which made up the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bernicia, it may be more specific to call their ethnicity "Anglian," than the more generic "Scottish."

The migration of Scots to Ulster occurred mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries (as detailed in the articles History of Scotland and Plantations of Ireland). The first major influx of Scots into Ulster came during the settlement of east Down, which was led by Sir James Hamilton and Sir Hugh Montgomery, two Ayrshire lairds. This statred in May 1607 and was followed in 1610 by the arrival of many more Scots as part of the Plantation of Ulster. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the native Irish Catholics 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. The memory of this traumatic episode poisoned the relationship between the Scottish and English settlers and the Irish Roman Catholics almost irreparably.

The Scottish population in Ulster was further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars, when a Scottish Covenanter army was landed in the province to protect the settlers from the native Irish Catholic forces. After the war was over, many of the 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. Also in the 1690s, the Scottish population of Ulster fought another war against the Irish Catholics - the Williamite war in Ireland. The Protestant victories at Derry, the Boyne and Aughrim are still commemorated today, because many Irish Protestants believed 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 were dispossessed and forced onto 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. However, along with Roman Catholics, they were legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to Anglicans, who were mainly the descendants of English settlers. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholics, there was considerable disharmony between the Ulster-Scots and the Ulster-English population of Ulster. In 1798, many Ulster-Scots joined the United Irishmen and participated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

However soon after 1798 most of those who had supported the United Irishmen saw that what they had fought for was now to become a reality through the Act of Union. Samuel Neilson, an Ulster-Scots contemporary of Samuel Thompson and one of the founders of the United Irishmen, remarked just prior to the Act of Union, "I see a union is determined on between Great Britain and Ireland. I am glad of it." Neilson accepted the Act of Union as an end to the corrupt Ascendancy-based Dublin Government and an opportunity to achieve equality and liberty for both Presbyterian Ulster-Scots and Irish Roman Catholics.

Samuel Thompson, the Bard of Carngranny, expressed the position of eighteenth century 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 in Ulster, which caused further discrimination against non-Anglicans, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots migrated to the North American colonies throughout the 18th century (250,000 settled in the USA between 1717 and 1770 alone). Disdaining the heavily English regions on the Atlantic coast, most groups of Ulster-Scot settlers crossed into the "western mountains", where their descendants populated the southern Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley. Others settled in northern New England and north-central Nova Scotia.