The Scots Irish

Ireland's Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said on St Patrick's Day 2018:

"Ulster-Scots Protestants are as much a part of the history of the Irish in America as the Irish Catholics are. In the same way, they are an integral, respected and valued part of the history - and the future - of the island of Ireland."

John Hume wrote in 1989:

"The Unionist people have a long and strong tradition in Ireland. They have a rich Protestant heritage and a great pride in their tradition. They have pride in their service to the Crown, pride in their contribution to the United States, in their spirit of industry and achievement, in their work ethic and in their faith. Their special metttle is believed by many of them to be expressed in victories in battles long ago, battles regularly commemorated. But that pride is expressed in an archaic supremacism and in a desperate fear that they could not survive in accommodation with other traditions. They must live apart. Living apart may have been acceptable as long as their hold on power was underpinned by successive British goverments: but that is no longer the case."

Edward Carson wrote in a letter to Woodrow Wilson in 1918:

"The Nationalist Party have based their claim to American sympathy on the historic appeal addressed to Irishmen by the British colonists who fought for independence in America a hundred and fifty years ago. By no Irishmen was that appeal received with a more lively sympathy than by the Protestants of Ulster, the ancestors of those for whom we speak to-day—a fact that was not surprising in view of the circumstance that more than one-sixth part of the entire colonial population in America at the time of the Declaration of Independence consisted of emigrants from Ulster. 

The Ulstermen of to-day, forming as they do the chief industrial community in Ireland, are as devoted adherents to the cause of democratic freedom as were their forefathers in the eighteenth century. 

But the experience of a century of social and economic progress under the legislative Union with Great Britain has convinced them that under no other system of government could more complete liberty be enjoyed by the Irish people."