The attempt to bring fresh pride to those who see themselves as Ulster Scots has sometimes been derided by individuals who pride themselves (quite rightly) on the richness of the Irish Language. These commentators cannot see that there is great value in prizing the Scots speech of Ulster. They fail to see that Scots has been a tongue in which great literature has been and still is created (Robbie Burns being the most well-known example) and that by pooh-poohing this linguistic endeavour they are repeating the very condescension that the Irish Language revivalist has often faced.
Whether the partition of Ireland remains, is modified or comes to an end, the north of this island will always be but a short sea-journey away from Scotland, a fact reflected in migratory patterns and the vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of local people. That proximity and affiliation helped in the construction of the resilient political philosophy of Ulster Unionism with its use of covenanting motifs garnered from a Scottish Presbyterian religion with its democratic structures and its devotion to Biblical exegesis.
Some critics tend to castigate the Ulster Scots movement’s deployment of Scottish cultural material as a simulacrum and a pastiche, made up of cloying Burns Nights and a raft of embarrassing road signage. However, they fail to berate Irish Nationalist formulations of identity in Boston and New York which could well be accused at times of nothing better than ‘Plastic Paddy-ism’.
In truth, all culture is constructed, and the important matter is to recognise whether that construction facilitates human growth or debilitates it in the adherents while denying it to others. Arguably both Unionism and Nationalism have been guilty at times of this sin.
The hostile attitude that regards Ulster Scots as a fabrication undoubtedly corrodes the morale of a project that in its time could grow, widen and mature, recognising the complexity of the Scottish identity to which it adheres and migratory patterns which are as much the property of many a Donegal Catholic family who took the boat to Glasgow as those who were reared on the coast of Co. Down with a view of Galloway from their front door. The links across the North Channel facilitated the Ulster Republicanism of the late 18th century just as they facilitated the imaginative re-use of Scots Covenanting motifs during the Home Rule Crisis.
But the maturation of any cultural project also requires wise decisions about what to abjure within the legacy. As an example, many in contemporary Irish Republicanism have grasped the need to condemn the reverence shown to the Young Irelander and separatist icon John Mitchel, due to his support for the slave-holding American Confederacy. Arguably more work is needed by Irish Republicans to expose the support for Hitler manifested during the 1940s by figures in the IRA such as Sean Russell. Indeed, it is arguable that the invocation of German support for the East Rising needs a long, hard reappraisal given not just the atrocities perpetrated by the German army in Belgium but also the indiscriminate warfare waged on the high seas by the German U boat fleet. Perhaps most tellingly of all there is the role of German imperialists in the destruction of the Herrero people in Southern Africa, an episode seen by some historians as the 20th century’s first genocide.
It is therefore important that the Ulster Scots project reviews the ethical significance and cultural value of its own heritage. This may involve reconsideration of identifying with the process whereby ancestral emigrants from Ulster colonised North America, displacing indigenous cultures and believing that the supposedly empty spaces which lay to the west were theirs by divine appointment. An uncritical attempt to create local tourism out of family sites connected to such dubious figures as President Andrew Jackson need to be reconsidered. Jackson’s record on forced removal of ‘Indian’ peoples is a notorious one.
But of course, the Ulster Scots project is not the only feature of indigenous pro-Union culture to be subject to hostility or downgrading. The musical culture which becomes especially visible each summer is that of the parading band, accompanied primarily in rural areas by the rich folk tradition of the fife and Lambeg drum. That is the subject of a future article.
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