Submission to the Ulster-Scots Advisory Panel Consultation part 3: Human rights in the age of Post Colonialism and republican populism

 3. Our Human Rights (p58)

The expansive section on Human Rights is timely as it is becoming an increasingly pertinent subject, moving forward. 

Page 62: “Outside of the Bill of Rights processes, NIHRC engagement with the Ulster-Scots community was virtually non-existent.” 

This needs to change and increase as the report suggests.

I did a very positive interview with CE David Russell several years back.  

How-ever their report into the Ulster-Scots sections of NDNA in May 2021 echoed strongly of mind sets concerned with past power relations between groups here, not likely future ones.    

Also on page 62 the report states: “We have also seen the peculiar circumstances of a local human rights group criticising Ulster-Scots recognition as a national minority.”

Irish catholics suffered long centuries of oppression, Ulster-Scots language and people came to Ireland in a situation of conquering – spoken about openly or not, this self-evidently counts.  

Post-colonial theory now has its most prominent and public adherents ever, at the top of the Irish state, ie Michael D Higgins; with the rise of republican populism continuing unabated. 

Politically driven reductionist ideas about Ulster-Scots from the nationalist sector have been around for 20 years.  

One is the purposeful insistence that Ulster-Scots is a culture or heritage unified by Ulster-Scots language only. 

The merit in using this false idea of Ulster-Scots, crudely, framed and defined as language only, is that a morally supreme argument for inclusion is created, allowing anyone who questions to be called out. 

A useful tool for dealing with ‘Protestant’.

Surely the spirit of the national minority designation is primarily to help the Protestant and Unionist community come to terms with being in the minority in Northern Ireland and be protected as a minority in a possible all Ireland state. 

Other good reasons for its existence pale in significance compared to this one.   

Proper, not an ethnicized vision of Human Rights, will likely be needed to stop our language, heritage and culture ‘tapestry’ being cherrypicked, by iconoclasts.  

The discussion alluded to in part 2 of my submission becomes all the more necessary.