AMERICAN presidents visiting the Republic of Ireland, and their speech writers, have always been careful to respect Northern Ireland’s separateness.
Speaking at College Green on May 23rd, President Obama referred to John Kennedy as the “first Irish president” and his list of great Irish-Americans included no Ulster people.
When Kennedy visited in 1963 he didn’t mention, at least in public, that any of his 34 predecessors had Irish origins. And his only reference to the people from whom they came was a sentence in his speech to the Oireachtas on June 28th about Lord Mountjoy’s lament that “we have lost America through the Irish”. Obama used the same quotation and attributed it to a “British official”.
That Lord Mountjoy was Luke Gardiner who began the building of the streets and square north of the Liffey that bear his names and who would be killed at the battle of New Ross on June 5th, 1798.
He was speaking in the Irish House of Commons in April 1784 and he added that the major part of the Continental army was Irish and that the valour of the Irish “had determined the conquest”.
At least half of the people subjects of his complaint called themselves “Scotchmen”. They would later be known as “Scotch-Irish” and at home they would be remembered as “Ulster-Scots”.
However described, they were the Presbyterians who emigrated from Ulster to the New World in the 18th century, and their descendants.
They left in surges between 1710 and 1730, in the early 1740s, in the mid 1750s and in the early 1770s to seek new homes where they would be free from religious discrimination, rackrenting landlords, poverty arising from bad harvests, and depression in the linen trade.
Initially, they mainly went to New York and New England, but by the 1720s their preferred destination was Pennsylvania and as the decades passed they settled increasingly in the south and the frontier areas where land was cheap but often occupied by native Americans with whom they clashed repeatedly.
By 1776, they constituted about 10 per cent of the American population.
Theodore Roosevelt described them as “the kernel of the distinctive American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the march westward”.
One of the most famous was Davy Crockett from Tennessee, “the king of the wild frontier”, the son of a man from Co Derry.
When the colonies revolted against England, the first resolution for independence came from the Scotch-Irish in the town of Mecklenberg, North Carolina on May 20th 1775, following the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Charles Thompson, the secretary of the first Congress, and Henry Polk, one of the four members of Washington’s first cabinet, came from Co Derry.
The first printer of the Declaration of Independence was John Dunlap from Strabane, and it was first published on this side of the Atlantic in the Belfast Newsletter.
Three presidents, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Chester Arthur were the sons of Scotch-Irish settlers.
Four others, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson had at least one Scotch-Irish grandparent and a further seven had more remote connections with Ulster.
Only one, Ulysses S Grant, visited Ireland. He came for five days in January 1879, two years after he left office, and received a mixed reception.
In Dublin, he was made a freeman of the city but Cork Corporation refused to receive him on the grounds that he was hostile to Catholic interests in the United States.
Undeterred, he travelled northwards by rail and was greeted by crowds in Drogheda, Dundalk, Portadown, Belfast, Ballymena and Coleraine and in Derry where he was also made a freeman.
More than a century earlier, in September and October 1771, Benjamin Franklin became the first distinguished American to come to this country. In Dublin, he visited the House of Commons and received the honour, normally reserved for visiting English MPs, of being invited inside the bar of the chamber.
Asking the members to breach the rules, the Speaker, Edmund Sexton Perry, stated that while the House would hardly consider the American assemblies on the same level as the English parliament, Franklin was “an American gentleman of character and a delegate of some of their parliaments”.
While here, he took the opportunity to lobby MPs he considered friends of America for support for equitable treatment for the colonies and suggested that given America’s “growing weight” there might be benefit for both countries in joining their interests.
He also had a chance encounter with the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Hillsborough, with whom he had crossed swords in London.
Hillsborough had described him as “a republican and a factious, mischievous fellow” and Franklin was surprised to be invited to visit the secretary’s castle in Co Down where he was given exceptional hospitality including a tour of the countryside accompanied by Hillsborough’s son, Arthur.
Franklin particularly appreciated that the youth gave him his cloak “lest I should take cold” but he suspected that his host’s “plausible behaviour” meant only that “by patting and stroking the horse, it would be made more patient while the reins are drawn together and the spurs are set deeper in his sides”.
Four years later, Hillsborough described him as “the most mischievous and bitter enemy England had ever known”.
Neither was he blind to the condition of the country.
He would write that Dublin was a magnificent city but that Ireland was poor and “the appearances of general extreme poverty among the lower people are amazing. They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw and subsist chiefly on potatoes. By contrast, our New England farmers of the poorest sort in regard to the enjoyment of the comforts of life are princes”.
He blamed “the discouragement of industry, the non-residence of pensioners, the leasing of farms by landlords to undertakers who ‘fleeced their tenants, skin and all’ and the sending of the first rents as well as most of the pensions out of the country”.
If he could return today, he would find some things vaguely familiar and not just the buildings in College Green.