Family ties and collective footprints – a human rights thought for Ulster-Scots

THIS Ulster-Scot has no family links to Scotland that are known, no known ancestors across the sheugh.

The citing of proud individual or family links is obviously fair enough, and many do.

Sometimes, advertently or inadvertently, this comes across as an attempt to skirt around or obscure tensions linked to the Plantation of Ulster and associated migrations and population movements both before and after that.

The resulting demographic changes are massively well documented with self-evident consequences today.

This, of course sits within a wider context of eternal proximity and commonality between Ireland and Scotland; the smorgasbord of links going back millennia.

You would think that a human rights case could be made, if individual family links, became markers to replace or de legitimize those affiliating with these Presbyterian or Protestant collective footprints going back four centuries.

Or that a sense of one single euphemistically defined sense of Ulster-Scots identity served to impose a conditionality to such an affiliation, allowing the moral cudgel of (past and present) oppressor to hang over such individuals or communities, who stepped out of narrative line, rather than embracing the modern standard and spirit of toleration of minorities.

There are many forms of Ulster-Scots, not one, with room for everyone.

The nearer the United Ireland comes, the stronger the case that can be made, will get.