Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments are the Maker’s instructions.

The Ten Commandments are absolute not obsolete.

The law cannot give us the salvation we need but it drives us to the cross of Christ where salvation is to be had.

Maurice Roberts

Elvis Presley's Scotch-Irish ancestry

Last night I was at the home of the American consul in Belfast for some photographs in relation to a new booklet entitled Ulster and Tennessee.  The booklet has been produced by the Ulster-Scots Community Network and provides short pen-portraits of some famous Tennesseeans with Ulster-Scots ancestry.  One of those included in the booklet is the singer Elvis Presley.

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on 8 January 1935 and he was the son of  Vernon Presley and his wife Gladys Love Smith.

His father Vernon Elvis Presley was born in Fulton, Mississippi, on 10 April 1916 and his paternal grandparents were Jessie D McClowell Presley (1896-1973) and his wife Minnie Hae Hood (1893-1980).  One researcher has traced the Presley family back to Scotland and the middle name McClowell also suggests Scottish or Scotch-Irish ancestry.

There was Scotch-Irish ancestry is his mother's family.  His maternal grandparents were Robert Lee Smith and his wife Octavia Luvenia Mansell and according to Elaine Dundy, who wrote the book Elvis and Gladys (1985):

Elvis's great-great-great-grandmother, Morning White Dove (1800-1835), was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. She married William Mansell, a settler in western Tennessee, in 1818. William's father, Richard Mansell, had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Mansell is a French name - its literal translation is the man from Le Mans. The Mansells migrated from Norman France to Scotland, and then later to Ireland. In the 18th century the family came to the American Colonies.

Republican night in GAA club

Last weekend, back in Ulster, there was a Republican Youth weekend in Strabane to mark the 25th anniversary of three IRA terorrists who were killed by the SAS.  The weekend began on Friday night in rather unrevolutionary fashion with a dinner dance but this was no ordinary dinner dance.  It was organised by Strabane Republican Flute Band.  On Saturday morning there was a republican tour of West Tyrone and then it was on to the Fountain Street community centre in Strabane for an exhibition about the three terrorists.

As part of the commemorative weekend there was a social event in Drumquin GAA Clubrooms on the Saturday evening.  These are the clubrooms of the Wolfe Tone's GAA Club and it is regrettable that a sport club is used to celebrate the memory of IRA terrorists.

According to the poster on the Ogra Sinn Fein website the music was provided by Patriot Flame along with a Republican Flute Band although another reference on the website states that the music was provided by what Ogra Sinn Fein describe as the Armagh rebel band Paddywagon.

Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda (2)

Another speaker at the Sinn Fein sponsored conference Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda was Margaret Ward, who was described as an author and historian.   In the course of her address she described herself as 'a representative for the women's sector in the Bill of Rights Forum' in 2008 and indeed she is very much to the fore in the 'women's sector'.

This is not her first time on a Sinn Fein platform and she was the speaker at a conference organised by Sinn Fein in March 2009 in Belfast to mark International Women's Day.  On that occasion she was introduced as chair of the Women's Centres Regional Partnership.  Acording to its website the WCRP is funded by DSD and is made up of four lead partners, one of which is the Women's Research and Development Agency, represented by Margaret Ward.

Dr Margaret Ward has a long political history stretching back to her days in the People’s Democracy. Then in October 1975 she was a founder member of the Socialist Women's Group, which was established by some of the most radical feminists.  It was a Trotskyist republican socialist group and it linked feminism to socialism and to Irish nationalism. According to Margaret Ward herself they ‘tried to link women’s oppression, partition and the imperialist domination of Ireland’. She further explained the Trotskyist nature of the group by saying ‘it was women who came from various places - from People’s Democracy, the Revolutionary Marxist Group and the Irish Workers’ Group - together with ones of us who hadn’t really a notion.’ The PD, RMG and the IWG were all Trotskyist organisations.  [A Difficult Dangerous Honesty p 17]

Carmel Roulston has also confirmed the distinctive political character of the SWG and she observed that, 'The Socialist Women’s Group members were for the most part involved in or associated with the Trotskyist or pro-IRA left.  [Women on the Margin p 226]

Another of her current interests is Hanna's House in Dublin, of which the WRDA in Belfast is a participating organisation.  This is named after the Irish republican revolutionary Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and it is perhaps significant that in 1997 Mary Ward wrote a biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington.

At the Bill of Rights Forum Margaret Ward was one of two representatives of the women's sector but she is hardly representative of the majority of women in Northern Ireland and that is an illustration of one of the fundamental flaws of the Bill of Rights Forum.  It was simply an unrepresentative body.

Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda (1)

Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda was the title of a conference, which was sponsored by Sinn Fein and held in London last Saturday, 20 February.   It was presented as part of Sinn Fein's strategy for a United Ireland but will have done nothing to forward that futile cause. 

The truth is that there can only be a United Ireland with the consent of unionists in Ulster and no amount of nationalists and republicans talking to other nationalists and republicans will alter the views of unionists.  There were two unionists on a panel later in the day but essentially this was about nationalists taking to nationalists.

Nevertheless the reports of the conference provide some interesting insights.  The opening speaker was Gerry Adams MP, president of Sinn Fein, and he was followed by a session chaired by the Labour MP Diane Abbott.  The contributors included Conall McDevitt MLA of the SDLP, Margaret Ward, who was described as an author and historian, and Jarlath Burns, a former GAA player, a former Daily Ireland columnist and now a GAA commenator on BBC.

Jarlath Burns, who was also a member of the Consultative Group on the Past, was quite frank about the political agenda of the GAA.

The GAA is a critical element in the conversation about Irish unity. You see, the GAA has never accepted partition. Some of our clubs straddle the border, Ulster consists of nine counties and the desire to seek Irish unity is enshrined in the Official Guide of the GAA. There is a commitment to the use of the Irish language and the promotion of Irish culture that is discrete yet honourable, inclusive, not intrusive and at all times, full to the neck of integrity that is to be admired and learnt from.

He also spoke about the pan-nationalist aspect of the GAA:

Within clubs, it can be just as fraught with the GAA having to be equally relevant to the SDLP and Sinn Féin in the north.

You can't get much clearer than that - 'the desire to seek Irish unity is enshrined in the Official Guide of the GAA' - and his choice of the word 'enshrined' is significant.  Not only is it there in the Official Guide but it is enshrined in the Official Guide.  There is no place for unionists in the GAA and there probably never will be.  Those who speak of the GAA reaching out to unionists and opening the door to unionists need to realise that the GAA is a nationalist organisation.

But that is not the end to the nationalist rhetoric of Jarlath Burns and he even manages to launch an attack on me personally:

And bringing us right up to date; this week Bryansford GAA are having their expansion plans thwarted by a particularly bigoted piece of political chicanery from the DUP minister of culture, a man who hadn’t even the guts to mention the GAA Ulster championship last summer in a statement promoting the summer of sporting activities in the six counties. And we are still in trouble because some of our grounds are named historically and emotionally after what we would term irish patriots, but who others would call terrorists. Off the field, we just can’t seem to win and this is why we are distinctly uncomfortable in the political arena and nowadays try to avoid it at all costs.

Jarlath Burns accuses me of 'a particularly bigoted piece of political chicanery' in relation to Bryansford GAA.  In fact I have had no role in relation to Bryansford GAA or their expansion plans and his personal and erroneous attack tells us more about his own prejudice than anything else.  It might be argued that his false accusation should be ignored, especially since it is on a Sinn Fein website, but Burns is a well-known figure who appears regularly on BBC television.  I intend to look into this matter further, especially since what appears once on the internet has a tendency to get repeated elsewhere.



 
 

Scotch-Irish in the Southern states

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South

Edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (2004)

Chapter 18, The South Through Other Eyes, page 327

Professor Helen Taylor

I came across the following paragraph on the Scotch-Irish of the American South, which was written by Professor Helen Taylor of the University of Exeter:

From the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution, the Southern backcountry was flooded with one of these groups, the Scotch-Irish, and it has been said that their heritage and style are the characteristics most associated with Southerners over the last two centuries: herding rather than tilling, leisurely, musical, tall-taletelling, violent, clannish, family-centered, fiercely Protestant, with a strong sense of honor.  Indeed, the term most used, usually pejoratively, to describe poor white Southern frontiersmenfrom the mid-1700s is the Scottish term for a noisy, boasting fellow, a 'cracker'.

Celtic DNA

Michael Conaghan, writing in the Belfast Telegraph (26 February) about the popularity of Country & Western music, asks, 'Why should a musical form so rooted in American rural values find a ready audience over here?'  He responds to this question by saying, 'The qualities that define the average Country song is (sic) one that appeals mightily to our Celtic DNA.'

The roots of Country music lie in the traditional folk music of the Appalachians and that area was home to many Scotch-Irish settlers, whose fathers and forefathers had taken their music and song with them across the Atlantic.  When Country music returned across the Atlantic it was therefore in some ways a musical homecoming.

But what on earth is Celtic DNA?  Are the people of Northern Ireland somehow Celtic?  I know what Celtic languages are but I find the concept of Celtic DNA rather bizarre.  The fact is that most of us have very mixed ancestries - in my own case there is an Ulster-Scots ancestry but my maternal family were originally of Dutch origin and I am sure that somewhere in my ancestry there will be English and Irish and other strains.  To describe the people of Northern Ireland as Celtic is therefore simply nonsense.