Ulster Scots?

What would become of Northern Ireland if Scotland ever did become independent?

In principle, the Irish Republic's renunciation of any territorial claim to the Six Counties ought to have been the end of the Republican dream in those Counties, as the Republic declared that it had no interest in them, that having always been perfectly and blatantly apparent.

Yet no one seems to have told that to Sinn Féin or to what has become, during the period since that renunciation, that party's enormous Northern electorate.

Sinn Féin has been wholly consistent in the debate about Scottish independence: despite the existence of a substantial Irish Republican subculture in the most populous part of Scotland, the party's position has been that, just as nowhere else has any business in those affairs of Ireland, so Ireland has no business in those affairs of anywhere else.

It is notable that the present Dublin Government, being led by Fine Gael, does presume to intervene, still taking an all-archipelago view even in order to weaken the United Kingdom, but thus the easier to construct a new and, in the 26 Counties, a popularly acceptable set of formal ties across the Irish Sea. A Treaty, even, for these pro-Treaty forces. When one adds its passionate Atlanticism and Eurofederalism, has Fine Gael ever seen a Treaty, actual or potential, that it did not like? Pro-Treaty, indeed.

By contrast the DUP is, hardly surprisingly, taking a very hardline Unionist view, indeed a more hardline Unionist view than, as a party, it can quite be said to take in relation to Northern Ireland anymore. Would the secession of the Plantation's ancestral motherland cut the ground from under the Plantation's Unionist descendants? Not as clearly or as definitely as one might at first assume.

For there are Unionists and Unionists. Within Northern Ireland, the Church of Ireland is almost as large as the Presbyterian Church. Very broadly, and admitting of all kinds of exceptions, there are the areas where the Protestant population derives from the Plantation, and there are the areas where that population was essentially part of the Pale; there are the areas where Ulster-Scots was, and arguably still is, spoken, and there are the areas where the Ulster dialects of English were and are spoken.

The first remain predominantly, sometimes very heavily, Presbyterian. The second remain predominantly, sometimes very heavily, Anglican. Ulster Anglican, to be sure; it was they, rather than the Presbyterians, who founded the Orange Order, and to this day newly appointed rural Rectors can find themselves aghast that they are expected, without anyone's ever even having thought about it, to preside at Orange Lodge services on certain days, such as the service at Drumcree Church, which is not Presbyterian, but Anglican.

 

Yet, all the same, not an outgrowth of the Church of Scotland and in large part a tribute to what that parent was a long time ago, but a body, the Church of Ireland, which is as old as the Church of England. A sister rather than a daughter, and a sister with a very distinctive character of her own, including, but by no means restricted to, family resemblances, and bonds of sibling affection. Previously an Established Church in its own right, and retaining much of the feel of one in Northern Ireland.

Lord Molyneaeux, longtime Sovereign Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution and for most of that time Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, including in strong opposition to Margaret Thatcher's Anglo-Irish Agreement, is a staunch Anglican. One is tempted to add, "Of course."

The Church of Ireland played a crucial role in saving the Irish language, and to this day one of the most Conservative Evangelical and one of the most uncompromisingly Unionist of its clergymen in Northern Ireland is also highly active in that cause.

The founding fathers of Irish Republicanism were members of the Church of Ireland, and indeed identified their own Protestant, "Saxon" nation as the only one on the island, with all national rights accordingly. They had no more sense of the political rights of Gaelic Catholics than their friends, allies and correspondents, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had of the political rights of their own slaves, or of the "Indians not taxed" in the context of a reversible "no taxation without representation".

It is in Northern Ireland, more than in Dublin and far more than in Cork, that the Church of Ireland, with the Anglo-Irish culture and identity of which it has always been the pillar, has remained an affair of all social classes, albeit with a posher than average ambience; very much like the Church of England, in fact.

Into the present century, its strongholds held out against the advance of the DUP, and cleaved to the UUP, longer than did those of Presbyterianism. To this day, the UUP does relatively better in those areas, and the only unambiguously Unionist MP who is not a member of the DUP, Lady Hermon, is, unless I am very much mistaken (in which case, I apologise to all concerned), the only remaining MP to be a member of the Church of Ireland.

Those who saw in the death of Sir James Kilfedder the definitive end of the tradition of Sir Terence O'Neill, of the Chichester-Clarks and of Rafton Pounder had reckoned without Sir James's successor but one. Within and alongside which, it is notable that her most affluent, and in every sense most Anglo-Irish, of Ulster constituencies has elected two Labour-allied MPs in succession, albeit of very different temper in more ways than one.

Lady Hermon, in fact, is even more Old Labour than Bob McCartney was, voting against encroachment by the European Union as he did, voting against the renewal of Trident as he probably would not have done, and voting against the abolition of the traditional definition of marriage as he almost certainly would not have done.

In similar vein, it is not without importance that the DUP voted against the retroactive legalisation of workfare, and voted to release the papers relating to the Shrewsbury 24. On the first point, it was joined by the MP who unseated its Leader from East Belfast, Naomi Long of the Alliance Party, who tellingly does not take the Liberal Democrat Whip in this era of the Coalition.

The DUP, the SDLP, Mrs Long as her party's only MP, and Lady Hermon, all voted against war in Syria. No MP from Northern Ireland voted in favour. The SDLP's MPs take the Labour Whip, making them the only Northern Irish MPs to have taken a mainland party's Whip in 40 years this year, while its members and supporters not only could, but frequently do, fit easily into the Labour Party in areas with large Irish-descended populations.

All in all, then, every constituency in Northern Ireland that does not return a Sinn Féin MP may be seen as existing well within the mainstream of Northern and non-English British politics. The province constitutes a fascinating, and these days mostly a peaceful, microcosm of the English, the Scots, and the Irish-Catholic tributaries that feed into that mainstream.

That would not be changed by Scottish independence. Moreover, the very fact that Scotland is also well within that mainstream ensures that that situation is not going to arise.