It’s to be hoped that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day will prove a milestone on the West’s road to recovery from self-doubt and self-deprecation, mass illegal immigration, fear of bold enemies without and unpatriotic communities within, and the current fracture in the European-American alliance.
The eloquent speechwriter knows the European well-springs of what became the great, pioneering American democratic mainstream. The two most important were British. “Our first colonies”, Rubio said, “were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system”. He went on: “Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.”
I confess Twain and Roosevelt took me by surprise, but a little probing proved the strain of the Scots-Irish in their heredity.
The popular association of the Scots-Irish (those we know in Northern Ireland as the Ulster-Scots) is with the shifting and hazardous frontier of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The record shows that “many landed in Pennsylvania before moving south into the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolina backcountry, and westward to Kentucky and Tennessee.” Rubio’s “hills of Ulster” were translated into the hills of Appalachia among other regions.
Between 1710 and 1776, 200,000 migrated from Ulster to the thirteen colonies (and they weren’t the first), navigating all the risks that began with a dangerous sea passage. Tens of thousands more arrived between 1783 and 1812 after American independence. The hardiest among them “were viewed as ideal front-line pioneers, often involved in frontier militias and serving as the ‘kernel’ of the American westward expansion”.
But what they offered went far beyond being frontiersmen. The waves of emigration were spurred by economic distress on the land and grasping landlords’ high rents. But Presbyterians had religious grievances, too, having for example to pay tithes to the established church which wasn’t theirs. They sought in America a better life but also freedom of worship and democratic government. Many were devout Protestants whose culture, discipline and moral purpose were distinctive.
Their New World contribution to theology, education and democracy was enormous. The American historian Carl Wittke wrote: “The schoolhouse and the kirk went together wherever the Scotch-Irish frontier moved”. Another American historian, F.B. Tolles, added that the Scots-Irish “kept the lamp of learning lighted on many an American frontier”. That the Scots-Irish arrived in North America as families would have reinforced their vested interest in education.
This was an advanced intellectual culture carried from Ulster across an ocean. You can read Helena Chesney’s account of the pioneering development of education in Ulster of the time, and David Livingstone’s account of the sophistication of science and theology in Ulster, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (1997).
Science, notably physics, geology, botany and biology, was in dynamic exchange with Protestantism. Science when applied back at home resulted in the vigorous linen-making, engineering and shipbuilding ingenuity and business that characterised Belfast and the Lagan Valley into the mid-twentieth century. The Olympic-class ocean liners built by Harland & Wolff, including RMS Titanic, were late, high-profile outputs of scientific energy. In Recoveries: Neglected Episodes in Irish Cultural History, 1860-1912 (2002), I record the notable achievements in engineering and shipbuilding, biology and evolution theory, and naturalists’ field-clubs.
Most of the Scots-Irish were Presbyterian and a later notable was James McCosh, Professor of Metaphysics at Queen’s College (later University) Belfast, who in 1868 became President of the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton University, founded in 1746 by New Light Presbyterians. But there were other denominations, including the Society of Friends. James Logan, a Quaker born in Lurgan in 1674, migrated to Philadelphia in 1699 and rose to become the most influential statesman and distinguished scholar in the Delaware Valley.
Indeed, the Scots-Irish achieved high political office, multiple times the highest office. At least eleven U.S. Presidents had firm claims to Ulster-Scots ancestry. This was far beyond what the size of the Scots-Irish population would have suggested likely. But because of where they came from and why, they had skin in the representative democracy game.
The Dissenting Protestants brought with them their penchant for religious fervour, argument and purity of faith. Their religious instinct was to hold the spiritual line and if necessary dissent and divide. They pre-dated the ethnic urban enclaves and quarters established by later immigrants from Catholic nations who came a century after them – the Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and French.
The Catholic Irish, mostly from the south of Ireland, favoured New York, Chicago and Boston (which had been Protestant in the 18th century), with their church and faith as a binding and nostalgic agent that nevertheless discouraged them from wholly assimilating even while integrating. The Irish quarters in the bigger cities were ethno-political power bases. As late as the 1970s through to the 1990s they showed their muscle when elements supported the anti-British, anti-Protestant IRA terror campaign, and through their influence on the American administrations helped to inhibit British strategic options in the military and political response to Irish republicanism
By contrast, the Ulster Protestants had from the beginning, like the English, Welsh and Scots, dispersed themselves from the arrival ports southward and westward, across rivers, mountains, plains and valleys and in sprouting towns. They were part of the gathering American mainstream, and lost over time some of their distinctiveness in the process. This was because they were British in what was still British America and could later be mistaken in names and attitudes for Scots and English. Rubio’s word “clan”, by the way, is not apposite. The Ulster-Scots had come to Ulster from the Scottish Lowlands whereas the clan system belonged to the Highlands, tracts of which had maintained the Catholic faith.
In Colonial and Republican America, the readiness of the Scots-Irish to be on the move, and by themselves if necessary, well served settlement, development, democracy and the national ideal of rugged individualism.
At home, however, this has put them at a disadvantage when challenging, or being threatened by, the determined collective thought and activism of Irish nationalism, both inside Northern Ireland and from the adjoining Republic.
Over centuries, until as recently as the 1990s, the Irish Catholic church imposed unanimity among its adherents through unquestionable dogma. Its influence was pervasive, a totalising feature belatedly captured in Claire Keegan’s beautifully written and obliquely accusatory novella (and then film), Small Things Like These (2016), set in the 1980s. Those who seriously rebelled or dissented showed Ireland a clean pair of heels – George Moore, James Joyce, AE (George Russell), Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett.
The new Irish Free State of 1922 set out in its “freedom” to establish a religiously dominated monoculture. The Protestant poet W.B. Yeats, who had been an architect of Irish cultural nationalism, guiding the Irish Literary Revival, but wanting a pagan, artistic Ireland self-governed by a cultivated aristocracy and a mystical peasantry, carriers of folklore, fruitlessly in 1925 deplored as a Senator the Catholic laws that were being passed, and thereafter spent much of his time in London.
It would be surprising if the broad unanimity of opinion that an established monoculture inculcates did not survive even major social changes. Although the Irish Catholic church has shrunk in power, its mass imprint has remained in the Republic of Ireland.
There is a high degree of political conformity on the biggest issues and scant dissent. How many in the Republic publicly question the need for a united Ireland? Or the strident pro-Palestine, anti-Israel policy of all the Irish political parties? Or the state’s bizarre economy? Or its military neutrality?
In these cases, policy can seem more like prejudice – or even dogma. Either the people agree with these cross-party political policies or they are disinclined to question them. Patriotism and Irish political nationalism have taken up the slack left by a shrinking Church; Irish nationalist orthodoxy has even grown stronger in the absence of the Church, for long thought to be a pillar of separatist Irish identity along with republicanism, the Irish language and the Gaelic Athletic Association.
This is what contemporary unionists, many of them descendants of the relatives of those who became Rubio’s Scots-Irish, seem ill-equipped to challenge forcefully, especially without support from Great Britain.
A similar picture emerged in Quebec when the dominant Catholic Church, assumed likewise to be a pillar of Quebec’s distinctive identity, lost its power in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Instead of Quebec nationalism weakening as a result, it strengthened and consolidated and has continued to do so, proving as indeflectible as Irish nationalism. (Multiculturalism stopped at the Quebec border.) When they lost two sovereignty referenda (Quebec’s “border polls”), Quebec nationalists replaced political agitation with a language-based cultural offensive. It now refers to itself as “the Quebec nation”, to no objection from a weak Canadian federal government that has appeased Quebec for decades.
The Irish Republic pursues the same attritional strategy while whistling innocently. Nationalist gains since the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) have been enormous. The Republic hopes like Quebec to achieve its goal culturally, economically and politically piecemeal, irrespective of constitutional reality, and irrespective of the unionists, many of them Ulster-Scots in ancestry.
But to succeed it requires an appeasing government on the other side of the net. The British in charge, ever since Thatcher against her own run of play signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), have so far been that government.
In contrast to the solid front Irish nationalism presents, the Ulster Scots/Scots-Irish were and are in the larger picture given to subdivision and individuality while remaining steadfastly and defiantly British. The existence of three competing pro-Union parties in Northern Ireland today whose constituents overlap is a vestigial expression of the problem. This diffuseness has allowed their enemies to caricature Ulster-Scots culture as fractious, working-class and unsophisticated, one of bonfires and marches, bigotry and drums, the polar opposite of Scots-Irish culture in the New World.
It has taken American republicans to recall the Scots-Irish to the virtues of their heritage, as part of the campaign to recall Europeans to their civilisational obligations amidst the recent and growing existential danger.
Marco Rubio summons Europeans to join Americans in being “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance”. Ulster Scots, and unionists in the larger tent (Church of Ireland, Catholic, humanist, atheist), should respond positively and enthusiastically along with other Europeans. Coincidentally as the power of Irish-America weakens in a multicultural America radically different from the old Euro-dominated “melting pot”, and the ties between Catholic Ireland and the U.S. loosen, unionists should make clear their support of Rubio’s call for cultural and political Euro-American rejuvenation.
The effort would require unionists to re-familiarise themselves with their common intellectual and political fount that inspired the Scots-Irish. That would be a small contribution to a cultural reawakening in the West in which unionists should be visible participants on their own ground.
Closer to home, though still ambitiously, and crucial in the long or even medium term, Ulster unionists need to transcend a devolutionary mentality (as the Scots and Welsh need to do also) since the recall to bedrock Western values that Rubio, but also Douglas Murray and numerous English commentators have promoted, requires England to be central in the daunting enterprise of revival.
The two well-springs of American cultivation of which Rubio reminded his European audience, the English and Scots-Irish, shared the English language, religious and cultural Protestantism across sects, and a belief in representative democracy. They shared too, with the Scots and Welsh, their imperial experiences in other far-flung places. The Irish Catholic church missionaries and Catholic Irish soldiers were part of the British Empire too (an historian of Irish Catholicism reminding us that the Irish Catholic church followed the Union flag as it moved), but their participation was excised from the record by Irish nationalist historians in the decades of agitation and uprising in the cause of Irish independence.
And Irish Catholic soldiers served valiantly in the Great War also but when the survivors arrived home in 1918 they were reviled as traitors. By contrast, the anti-Home Rule Ulster Volunteers who composed the 36th (Ulster) Division were regarded at home as heroes. They were mostly dead heroes, the division suffering 5,500 casualties in the first two days of the Battle of the Somme, killed, wounded or missing, and winning four VCs. The Somme, still commemorated with deep feeling today in Northern Ireland, was seen as a vindication of the anti-Home Rule campaign and an event creating a community consciousness bordering on a national consciousness, comparable to the nation-building importance of the Gallipoli campaign (1915) for Australia and New Zealand and the Battle of Vimy Ridge (1917) for Canada.
In a sad repetition of affairs, soldiers from Eire fighting for Britain in World War Two had their bravery essentially stricken from a record written by a neutral country while soldiers, sailors and airmen from Northern Ireland were heralded naturally.
How odd that nationalism (especially English nationalism) is abhorred by progressive English politicians and commentators but Irish nationalism is to be approved and even admired. Orwell observed this contradiction in his Notes on Nationalism back in 1945. Given all that Northern Irish unionists and other Britons share, unionists are pained and puzzled that even after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement twenty-eight years ago establishing complete equality in governance, and after a thirty-year IRA anti-British terrorist campaign, England favours Irish nationalism over Northern Irish unionism. England has forgotten who its friends and cultural kin are. Southern Irish politicians and commentators after all this time still enjoy Schadenfreude over England’s difficulties. And even were Northern Ireland to be ceded to the Republic of Ireland, that would not change since the Irish attitude long pre-dates partition in 1922.
In a Daily Mail column of January 26, Peter Hitchens confessed to laughing bitterly while reading about the fuss over the possible surrender of the Chagos Islands and Greenland when no one in England seems to give a toss that a significant chunk of UK territory is being given away by degrees to what in the future will likely be a Sinn Fein Irish government. That, he says, will be an even greater surrender and a further diminishment of the United Kingdom itself. Since that column, we can now add Gibraltar to the Chagos Islands as the spur for controversy over the UK’s willing self-subtraction.
The notorious claim in the Downing Street Declaration of 1993 that Northern Ireland is of no strategic interest to the UK now reads like naive self-harm in the light of the present geopolitical reality to which Marco Rubio is alluding. Rubio is doing much more than asking us to commemorate and reawaken our common inheritance. By heritage he includes values, and from values come policies and in the broadest sense a civilisation or culture worth defending against its enemies.
In their 2024 Policy Exchange report, Closing the Back Door: Rediscovering Northern Ireland’s Role in British National Security, Hendriks and Halem reasserted Northern Ireland’s role in national defence in the new dangerous geopolitical dispensation. The Republic of Ireland meanwhile is steadfast in its neutrality and continues to freeload militarily under the UK defence umbrella. In 2025 the then President, Michael Higgins, raged against NATO for its plans to beef up its armaments. The frontier, you might say, is now inside the UK itself.
The European girding of loins that Rubio calls for requires a common acknowledgement of cultural identity and its reaffirmation and defence. England like all the other countries that Rubio addressed needs to recognise and affiliate with those who share the common inheritance. That includes the real and figurative Scots-Irish among us.
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Professor John Wilson Foster’s recent books include The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland (co-ed, 2020) and Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences (2024).
