The family ties the pride in those Ulster Scots immigrants, those those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep, very deep.Men born in Ulster are among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour for freedom’s cause.The man who printed the revolutionary document was John Dunlap. He hailed from County Tyrone. And countless, countless others established new lives of opportunity across the Atlantic. Planting farms, founding communities, starting businesses, never forgetting their connection to this island.As a matter of fact as you walk into my office, the Oval Office, in the US capital, guess what? You know who founded and designed and built the White House? An Irishman. That’s not a joke. Not a joke. Passing it down generation after generation.Your history is our history. But even more importantly your future is America’s future.
Joe Biden Praises the Scots-Irish
You probably won’t read this in an American paper, and the speech was carefully given overseas. Specifically, in Ulster.
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As much as I like to see my people get the recognition they deserve, I wish it had come from a more credible source.
Anytime I hear Joe Biden say something is "not a joke", I immediately assume he's lying. I guess I'll have to reassess that a bit, as some internet searching seems to confirm the White House was designed by an Irishman.
Is he just glossing over that the Irish and the Scots-Irish are not the same people, and are both historically and currently at loggerheads?
I could make them all a little crazy by insisting that the Irish are actually the Scotti and the Scots are actually the Picts, and that they are all part Viking and not so much Anglo-Saxon and we don't really know who any of them are before the Common Era.
I think he is glossing over that because he's speaking in Ulster; there's a kind of sensibility to telling the Scots-Irish who have lived in Ireland for another several hundred years that they're also Irishmen.
Perhaps that's overthinking it, though, which Joe Biden certainly didn't do.
"...the Irish are actually the Scotti and the Scots are actually the Picts..."
The Scots are that part of the Scotti who came to Dalriada's eastern portion and intermarried with the Picts, anyway. The Pictish insistence on transferring property on the maternal line seems to have sent all their property to their Scottish in-laws, who passed their own property paternally to their own sons. About the time of Kenneth MacAlpin, the Pictish power vanishes from the record.
You're right that there's very little Anglo-Saxon heritage there, though the Normans who conquered the Anglo-Saxons later also came north and married into the Gaelic lines. The nobility all ended up related to some greater or lesser degree, though the common folk diverged substantially. (Especially in the northern, western, and coastal regions where the Viking heritage is strongest.)
Time for some clarification. First of all, the vast majority of Scots that settled in Ulster were from the border of Scotland and England. Although this region was almost in constant conflict for 500 years, the inhabitants of this region regularly intermarried across the border. Consequently, the people of the border region were a mix of Saxon, Celt, Norman, and Norse. In short, as both David Hackett Fischer and James Webb have observed, they were, and still are, a mixed people.
Fair regarding the Borderers. And, too, there was more trade than people imagine -- especially along rivers and seas. These were societies in which sea-travel was well-understood, and often unified as much or more than internal land-based borders (see example the North Sea Kingdom that unified the Danelaw with Denmark; the Norse jarls in Orkney and elswhere; the MacDonalds, "Lords of the Isles"; and Dalriada itself, which existed in both Ireland and Scotland). So it's not as if there was any sort of strict separation of bloodlines.
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