INTERESTING editorial, to add to the ‘Planter and Gael’ debacle, from the United Irishmen’s newspaper the Northern Star St Patrick’s Day 1797, just weeks before it was closed and the presses smashed.
Note how the Presbyterian United Irish men knew their origin (in Scotland), with the last main phases of migration only pittering out barely a century before this.
Here they flag it up, not to celebrate it, but to politically affirm how indigenous everyone had become in just four generations. The ‘colonial spirit’ changed to that of ‘native’.
This is an aspirational polemical speel obviously, the situation on the ground was far more complex, with ‘all sentiment of foreign descent’ very far from ‘obliterated’.
The sentiments are powerful nevertheless, asserting a fiercely strong sense of belonging.
The Presbyterian Republican’s affirming of their Irish identity and right to possession of their (new) homeland with other Irish people. But of course their occupying the land was still highly contentions and was ultimately unresolved.
Is this unionist outrage in recent days, the stampede to affirm and confirm indigenousness to Ulster, a modern day re running of this piece, where an uneasy sense of origin compels a sturdy narrative of possession and re-buffal.
EXTRACT:
The disarming of the Presbyterians of Ulster
The Philosopher will trace the astonishing changes that the human mind undergoes at different eras and under different circumstances – he will see how the colonial spirit of the North, gradually change into that of native; he will perceive that in the course of four generations, liberty, toleration, mutual kindness, mutual interest and national manners, obliterated every sentiment of foreign descent. Foreign attachment and foreign interest, and terminated in the UNION Of IRISHMEN on a basis as large as the island, on principles as pure as Christianity; and with objects in view no less than the liberty and independence of the land.
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