From God's Frontiersmen

Excerpt from the book God's Frontiersmen 1989

The popular image of the Ulster Protestant purveyed by much of the world's press and television and by the authors of instant studies of the Irish question is that of a red-faced man, his features contorted,beating a large drum. This simple visual clich'e has been used repeatedly to convey violence,intransigence and bigotry,neat labels under which,in the high speed information world of to-day,a busy journalist can package an entire people. Each television documentary or book on the Ulster troubles offers a history of the so-called native or Catholic Irish but usually nothing on the background of the Protestant people. It is almost as if they were destitue of features,emotions or even intelligent life,without existence in time,a monolith whose only purpose is to be the granite against which the national aspirations of an Irish people are dashed. The intention of this book is to explode that myth.

The ancestors of the Protestant population of Ulster arrived there in a series of immigrations during the seventeenth century,coming from the Scottish Lowlands and Borders and to a lesser extent from various parts of England,as far apart as Lancashire Norfolk and Devon. Within a hundred years they had transformed the north of Ireland from a land composed largely of woods and swamps,interspersed with small areas of modest culivation,into a province with roads,market towns and ports,supported by an increasingly arable system of farming,a thriving cattle trade and a domestic textile industry. Into a country where Catholic medieval values and an indolent pastoral economy pervaded, they brought Calvinastic Protestantism and a stern work ethic.

Although they came into what was an English colony and many of them were originally part of the official settlement of Ulster by the English Crown,the Scots so predominated in numbers,in the toughness of their culture and in the determination with which they acquired land, that the whole Plantation enterprise took on Scottish characteristics and the name 'Ulster Scots' came in time to be applied to the entire non-Irish population of the province which included large numbers of English, much smaller numbers of Welsh and some refugee French Protestants. In America the term 'Scotch-Irish',which had originally been used by Ulster students training for the Presbyterian ministry at Scottish universities,was applied to the Protestant immigrants from Ulster to distinguish them from the Catholic Irish who arrived later. For the purposes of this book,the terms Ulster Scots-or Scotch-Irish are regarded as interchangeable; they are also applied for the sake of identification in chapters dealing with Canada,Australia and New Zealand, lands where these terms would not have been known.