Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Scots-Irish candidate for a Scots-Irish people?

Megan McArdle is surely right that Jamie Kirchik’s prediction that Massachusetts may vote Republican this November seems, shall we say, implausible. Kirchik suggests that:

a Scots-Irish war veteran as the Republican nominee complicates predictions about whom Kennedy Country will support come November.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper. As Megan says, “Irish” America is largely catholic, whereas the descendants of the Scots-Irish, er, are not. More to the point, not many of them live in New England. The Scots-Irish constituency, to the extent is still exists, is found in Tennessee, southern Virginia and the Carolinas.

Still, in pointing out Kirchik’s mistake, Megan commits one of her own. It wasn’t Iain Paisley who popularised the oft-misquoted line that Northern Ireland be “protestant nation for a protestant people”, it was James Craig (himself of fine Scots-Irish stock), the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. This, for sure, offends modern sensiblities but ought to be remembered in the context of its time. To wit, an era in which Eamon de Valera insisted upon the virulently Roman Catholic nature of the Free State to the south. As Craig told the House of Commons in 1934:

The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.

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