Who were the Scotch Irish?

Article in the August 2016 edition of The Harp

In the last edition of The Harp I looked into whether the city of Birmingham had ever had a history of serious sectarian division and was both pleased and relieved to find that generally, or at least in modern times, it had not.

As a born and bred Brummie with strong Irish genes but a love of the culture and heritage of the whole of the British Isles, I would personally be reluctant to entrench myself behind any culturally and certainly not religiously based barricade at the expense of diversity and community cohesion. I would but wish that this disposition was shared by all inhabitants of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

In the West Midlands, Irish Catholic families have always lived happily next door to C of E, Methodist, Quaker and Pentecostal worshipping neighbours, as well as a rich abundance of other faiths. The story in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland however has been different with communities divided along sectarian grounds for many generations.

My own understanding of Protestant culture in Northern Ireland is admittedly based largely on my reading of Irish history from the perspective of the oppressed majority (Catholic) attempting to gain equality and self-determination from an enforced establishment (Protestant). My view is also influenced by decades of seeing confrontational Orange parades on television, which seem to intransigently and triumphantly march around the north of Ireland reminding their Catholic neighbours, through the beat of very large drums, of their historical position at the bottom of the pile.

 

But is this a fair view of Northern Irish Protestant culture? Are my own prejudices giving me a distorted, stereotypical or incomplete understanding? To find out more about the culture of Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially the loyal institutions such as the Apprentice Boys and the Orange Order, I recently bought a large book titled The Faithful Tribe – An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards. A well-known southern Irish journalist, historian and author from a Catholic background, Ruth Dudley Edwards has also been a noted advocate for the right of northern Protestants to hold their parades. Her book is a fascinating exploration of Ulster loyalist heritage.

Ruth Dudley Edwards gives voice to the working class people beneath the ceremonial regalia – the farmers and labourers, teachers and businessmen, ministers and pensioners. “Many of whom” she says “speak wistfully of the days when their Roman Catholic neighbours would come out to enjoy the parade”.

My only issue with this is not so much the right of anybody to have such an innocuous thing as a parade, but that the theme of Orange Order parades (unless Ruth Dudley Edwards reveals differently) is strongly linked to sectarian themes of the Protestant ascendancy over their Catholic enemy.

In this restricted context it does become difficult to then have an open mind about the wider heritage and culture of the Protestant Scotch-Irish, to have a starting point not clouded by pre-conceived prejudice, justly founded or not. However, this was recently challenged when my new American brother-in-law Mike asked me to research his family tree and I discovered a branch of Scotch-Irish frontier families who had originated from Ulster in the 1700s.

My starting point on Mike’s research was that his father’s family were from Italian migrants into New York in the early 1900s - impoverished southern-Italian farmers seeking a better life in the tenements of Brooklyn. This was comfortable ground for me given the well-documented parallels between the experience of the southern-Italian farmers of the 1890s and 1900s and the western-Irish migrants fleeing post-famine conditions of the 1850s and 60s. As well as escaping similar conditions of poverty and prejudice, both communities shared the Roman Catholic faith which also bonded them to some degree in New York.

Another branch of Mike’s tree were Polish Jews who, again, went to the States to escape terrible persecution and dispossession under Russian occupation of Warsaw in the 1880s and 1890s, many going to the States via London. It was on Mike’s mother’s side that I discovered a branch of original settlers in the 1700s with the surname Elliott. A 4 x great grandfather of Mike, named George Elliott was a frontiersman who had fought in the Revolutionary War of 1775 and then become a rebel in an armed uprising called Shays’ Rebellion where local farmers from Massachusetts, many of whom were former soldiers from the Revolutionary War, rose up against heavy taxation from Boston.

 

Further research showed that the core group of rebels in Shays’ rebellion, including the leader Daniel Shays himself, were Presbyterian Ulster Scots from an American town called Pelham. George Elliott was himself a member of this community, renowned for being the frontiersmen who built the first stockade-towns at the boundaries of colonised America. The surname Elliot is from a Scottish clan, many of whom went to Ulster in the 1600s where an additional letter T was added to the end of their surname. As dissenters, the Scotch Presbyterian community suffered their own discrimination in Ulster which led to a migration to America during the early 1700s.

Suddenly I was feeling a sense of admiration for the Ulster Scots as brave, resilient, visionary and faithful people taking on the huge adventure of travelling into the wild-west, establishing their new communities in difficult environments, whilst also standing up for rights and justice during Shay’s Rebellion and similar local conflicts.  

It’s always good to shine a new light on one’s pre-conceived views!