Protestant celebration to be toasted in rare tongu

[earl]

Burns Night celebrations across Northern Ireland this weekend will have an added political twist as well as the tartan-wearing, haggis-eating nostalgia of parties in Scots' communities around the world.

A growing number of Northern Ireland's Protestants are working to establish their Ulster-Scot cultural identity in competition with their Catholic fellow countrymen's Irish Gaelic identity.

For them the Lowland Scots' poet, Robbie Burns, is an icon. As well as traditional toasts to the haggis there will be toasts in one of the European Union's most recently recognised minority languages, Ulster Scots.

Burns' almost indecipherable dialect is the nearest thing Ulster Scots have to proof that the language they claim as their birthright is real, even though it was only identified as a language in 2000, when the British Government registered it as a European Union minority language as part of the peace negotiations that achieved the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the St Andrews Agreement of 2005.

Only 4 per cent of Northern Ireland's 1.5 million people speak Irish Gaelic, which was already registered with the EU.

Far fewer speak Ulster Scots, which has only developed its own dictionary and been recognised as anything other than an argot of the Protestant working class back streets since 2000.

But the tiny number of speakers in no way reduces the passion of the many Protestants who want to promote this as their cultural and racial identity. An important test of their political muscle will come later this year, when the power sharing executive set up last year after the St Andrews Agreement and lead by the Protestant First Minister, the Rev Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and his Catholic Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, will act to introduce an Irish Language Act, to promote the use of Irish Gaelic.

The legislation will mirror that in Wales and Scotland, which gives status to Welsh and Scots Gaelic and also funds education in those languages. The Irish Republic has similar protection for Irish Gaelic. Protestants, many of them members of Paisley's DUP, want parity.

The debates will sound comical to outsiders, but the separate Catholic and Protestant identities the language issue highlights are far too real for politicians in London and Dublin, anxious to keep Stormont's show on the road, to ignore.

[tp]

........ Ulster Scots, which has only developed its own dictionary and been recognised as anything other than an argot of the Protestant working class back streets since 2000.

SCRIEVINS AN LEID

Buiks, quairs an sic scrievins, alang wi tha leid - the maist poustie o aa fowk airts - bis aa claucht thegither. Bein the wud be tha maist quirkie gate fur gien onie leid a guid heeze, quairs houls tha heich grun biz ither soarts o airts an airtsome daeins (like tha dhramatics, airts o modhren-day fowks, an auld-farrant airts), forbye aa thae differ kine o fowkgates in Norlin Airlann quhaur quairs, scrievit in Inglis is fair taen up wi, an gien a heft wi, a poustie tongue, quhilk hersel gies a guid showin o innins frae Gaelic an frae Scotch. An forbye, ye cannae tak leid awa frae tha hale kine of groonin it wud hae in histhorie an fowkgates.

Translation = Literature is closely involved with that most common and sturdy of all community arts, language. As the most complex renovator of language, literature holds a central place both in relation to other artforms and arts activity (e.g. theatre, community arts, traditional arts), and to issues of cultural diversity in Northern Ireland where literature in English is vitally engaged with, and empowered by, a vigorous speech, which itself reflects a diversity of influences from Irish and from Scots. Nor can language be divorced from the variety of its historical and cultural contexts.

[earl]

I see that the Ulster Scots board have bought a load of air-time on Irish tv at the moment to promote themselves. They use very liberal language in it too, claiming it to be everyones culture. Nice to see that things are on the right path where such an agency can advertise freely on Irish tv.

[tp]

Ulster-Scots would have been in some of the counties of the republic too, especially in county Donegal, so probably right and proper to give it air time on Irish tv also. Saying that there are protestants in the north who don't even realise that they are of Ulster-Scots stock. There again catholics also, who have may have converted from protestantism over past generations.

[Jim]

I could be from Japan for all I know or care to be honest, it doesnt define what I identify with.

[tp]

jim said:

I could be from Japan for all I know or care to be honest, it doesnt define what I identify with.

What or who you define or align yourself with can be choice, and that's fair enough.

[Jim]

Well that seems to be it, we have a choice but at the same time we dont. I didnt have a choice to be baptised a catholic or be brought up in west belfast, others didnt have a choice to be brought up a protestant on the shankill. What I meant to say was I think the whole "what stock you come from" from a thousand years ago means nothing to me, some of my family could (and are) from scotland, the rest from Ireland, and would have originated somewhere else before that, so the Ulster-scots/Irish thing doesnt make sense to me and never will, it should be defined on where you were born and where you live at that moment, and the community you were brought up in.

that probably didnt even make sense.