Ulster Scots – You’ve been framed!
Résumés
Cet article explore la façon dont l’œuvre de Georges Didi-Huberman, philosophe et historien de l’art, peut nous aider à comprendre les techniques employées par ceux qui ont cherché à « invisibiliser » la culture et l’héritage ulster-scots. Didi-Huberman, surtout dans son Peuples exposés, peuples figurants (2012), propose une série d’outils conceptuels qui mettent en évidence les mécanismes qui conduisent à la marginalisation de ceux qui appartiennent à ce qu’il appelle un « peuple figurant ». En outre, il soulève des interrogations qui nous permettent d’intervenir pour rectifier ce qu’un critique appelle le « déficit de représentation » qui en résulte. De tels cadres nous amèneront à réévaluer la production culturelle qui émane des régions où l’héritage ulster-scots est fortement implanté afin d’identifier des contenus ulster-scots restés jusqu’alors invisibles.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Ulster Scots, Didi-Huberman (Georges), invisibilisation, film, photographie, autonomie pour l’IrlandePlan
Haut de pageNotes de la rédaction
A first version of this paper was given at the “Novelty in Unionism and Loyalism” conference organised by Hélène Alfaro-Hamayon (Gustave Eiffel University) and Joana Etchart (Pau University) which was held at Gustave Eiffel University on 14 October 2021.
Texte intégral
1Historically, the Ulster Scots have been faced with a number of significant problems in their attempts to render their story comprehensible to a wider audience.
2Firstly, there is the difficulty of knowing just who we are talking about in that “Ulster Scots” – already a composite term straddling Scotland and Ireland – melds, mid-Atlantic, into another composite term, “Scotch-Irish”, the preferred term in America.
3If the lexicon used to describe them is difficult to pin down in terms of space, they have another major problem in that their story constantly appears to be going in and out of focus across time. The reason for this is that the history of the Ulster Scots / Scotch-Irish has been written into several (sometimes competing) national histories – those of Scotland, Ireland and America. When the Ulster Scots appear in Ireland, whatever they did there is presented as a sub-plot of Irish history; when they appear in Scottish history, they are re-cast as Scots who have returned to the fold; and when the same Ulster Scots turn up in America, they are seen as just extras in the bigger picture of United States history. In other words, the Ulster Scots always seem to end up playing supporting roles – wherever they go. They only become visible, momentarily, according to the needs of someone else’s metanarrative. When those constructing these narratives have no further use for them, they disappear again; they become invisible, or perhaps, as we shall see, they are made invisible.
The need for a “connected history”
- 1 Colonel A. K. M’Clure, “Scotch-Irish Achievement”, in The Scotch-Irish in America: Proceedings of t (...)
- 2 A. C. Floyd, “The Scotch-Irish Congress, Its Objects and Results”, in The Scotch-Irish in America…, (...)
4The earliest example that we get of a distanced analysis of this fundamental problem of representation comes in an address to the first congress of the Scotch-Irish Society of America, held in Colombia, Tennessee, in May 1889. On that occasion, Colonel A. K. M’Clure of Philadelphia put forward the idea that, unlike other groups such as the Puritans or the Quakers, “[t]here is not a single connected history of the Scotch-Irish in American literature”.1 This idea of producing a “connected history” of the Scotch-Irish is picked up by A. C. Floyd, one of the members of the Publishing Committee that prepared the proceedings of the congress, who makes it clear that the writing of such a “connected history” is indeed the ultimate purpose of the society. He goes on to foresee the “complete collection of data” concerning the activities of the Scotch-Irish in America.2
- 3 This issue comes up again in two talks given in Edinburgh (1911) and Belfast (1912) by the American (...)
5Although M’Clure and Floyd do not say so in so many words, the subtext of their remarks is that, as far as the Scotch-Irish were concerned, this lack of a custom-built historiography meant that they were either reduced to the status of an extra in someone else’s scenario, or, even worse, that they were consciously written out of history.3
6Although this was to a large extent true, the marginalisation and invisibilisation of the Scotch-Irish, and, by extension, the Ulster Scots, cannot be presented simply in terms of victimisation. In many ways, it could be said that it was their own fault for allowing themselves to be incorporated into other people’s narratives rather than writing their own. They were indeed late starters in the field of historiography and by the time they had begun to produce a narrative of themselves that attempted to detach the Ulster Scot consciously from other national narratives, these were already so firmly in place that they were difficult to deconstruct.
7It is nonetheless interesting that it should be the Ulster-Scots community in America that articulates the need for a comprehensive strategy of historiographical research with a view to producing an agreed all-inclusive narrative. There is no evidence of any similar, all-embracing statement of intent in Ulster. And yet, that “complete collection of data”, although never theorised – even at such a basic level – had been going on there, at least since the 1850s.
- 4 W. T. Latimer, A History of the Irish Presbyterians, Belfast, J. Cleeland and Edinburgh, R. W. Hunt (...)
- 5 Alexander G. Lecky, In the Days of the Laggan Presbytery, Belfast, Davison & M’Cormack, 1908.
- 6 See, for example, An Account of the Life of Robert Cunningham, A. M., Minister of Holywood in Irela (...)
8One obvious source was the body of Presbyterian Church histories that were being written at this period, things like the Rev. Latimer’s History of the Irish Presbyterians published in 1893.4 Such general histories were complemented by the histories of given presbyteries such as Rev. Alexander G. Lecky’s history of the Laggan Presbytery in Donegal, published in 1908,5 and by the numerous histories of individual congregations or well-known ministers.6 All of these contributed to the strengthening and embedding of the image of the Ulster Scot in the popular imagination.
- 7 Patrick, Samuel Fee and Thomas Given, Poems from College and Country, by Three Brothers, Thomas Giv (...)
- 8 W. G. Lyttle, Sons of the Sod [1886], Bangor, Books Ulster, 2005.
- 9 Archibald McIlroy, The Auld Meetin’-Hoose Green, Belfast, M’Caw, Stevenson & Orr, 1898.
9Then, there was the poetry by people like Thomas Given or Adam Lynn,7 or the Kailyard novels like Sons of the Sod, by the newspaper editor and performer W. G. Lyttle,8 or the short story collections like The Auld Meetin’-hoose Green, by Archibald McIlroy.9 These people were producing material in Ulster-Scots about the Ulster-Scots community for an audience in Ulster and in the Ulster-Scots diaspora in North America – The Auld Meetin’-Hoose Green, for example, was published in Toronto (1899), the year after it appeared in Belfast. Much of this writing is not explicitly political. It was more interested in providing focused representations of the Ulster-Scots community for internal consumption. The fact that so much of this stuff was being produced during the Home Rule period suggests not only that there was a very real demand for such material but also, by extension, that the readers were very aware of themselves as a distinct “imagined community” that sought – and deserved – literary expression.
- 10 John Harrison, The Scot in Ulster: Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster, Edin (...)
10On top of that, there were the more overtly political writings that emerged during the period by people like the Scot, John Harrison, author of The Scot in Ulster (1888).10 This material was specifically designed to contribute to the on-going debate on Home Rule and to offer a radically different perspective to the growing body of work promoting an “Irish Ireland”.
- 11 Publishing in New York and Princeton, authors such as Charles A. Hanna, author of the two-volume, T (...)
11Outside the Ulster context, there was, as we have already seen, a considerable body of history writing being produced by the Scotch-Irish community in America.11 This is vitally important because it allows the Ulster Scot to be imagined on a global scale.
12Thanks to these various strands coming together at this period, the Ulster Scots found themselves centre stage for the very first time. At last, they could see coherence and pattern in a distinct and separate narrative about themselves. This newly-asserted – and assertive – sense of belonging to a distinct community was to be put to use by those organising resistance to Home Rule.
13It is clear therefore that the unionist politicians who called on Ulster-Scots references in this campaign are not generating an artificial discourse disconnected from a base in the community. On the contrary – and despite what those hostile to Ulster Scots would have us believe – they are giving expression to a culture that is clearly of fundamental importance for a considerable proportion of the Ulster population for whom an Ulster-Scots identity is an everyday reality in terms of linguistic use and folk practice.
- 12 For an examination of how Ulster-Scots history and culture were used in support of the unionist cam (...)
14It is indeed the solidity of that cultural base that was the reason for using Ulster-Scots material and the Ulster-Scotland frame in unionist propaganda at the Home Rule period. A propagandist does not use material that will not produce an echo in the target audience. The Home Rule debate dragged on for fifty years, with recurring periods of crisis demanding constantly renewed political responses. Propagandists will not return to the same material over a period of two generations unless they know they have tapped into something that is finding a response in the target community.12
15Taken together, this body of material seeks to place the Ulster Scot at the centre of an organised identity narrative that is self-consciously pieced together in order to produce a clear idea of a continuum through time and across considerable tracts of space.
Fragmentation and invisibilisation as political weapons
16Despite the construction of this increasingly coherent body of material that confirmed a posteriori the existence of a specific Ulster-Scots tradition over the centuries, those hostile to the increasingly vocal unionism of the Ulster-Scots community over the final decades of the 19th century sought systematically to impose the idea that Ulster-Scots culture, whose existence they continued to challenge, was heavily fragmented, and, at best, only of marginal importance in the context of a broader, all-inclusive Irish history. This was the case at the Home Rule period. It continues to be the case today.
- 13 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’œil de l’histoire, vol. IV, Peuples exposés, peuples figurants, Paris, Min (...)
17In order to assess some of the theoretical implications of this for the representation of Ulster-Scots culture, it is interesting to look at the work of a contemporary philosopher and art historian, Georges Didi-Huberman, and in particular at the fourth volume of a huge project on the notion of seeing, L’œil de l’histoire, entitled Peuples exposés, peuples figurants, published by the Éditions de Minuit in 2012.13
- 14 Ibid., p. 141-144. The film is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TwV4uCrDhY&t=2 (...)
18Didi-Huberman starts his analysis of the notion of what he calls a “peuple figurant” (a people of extras) looking at one of the first-ever films, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895), by the Lumière brothers, which shows the workers leaving their factory at the end of a shift. He is interested in the film because it raises a number of fundamental questions about the representation of what he calls “les sans-nom” (the nameless), those who, under normal circumstances, are “privés d’image” (deprived of an image).14
- 15 Ibid., p. 57.
19Looking back into the history of image, Didi-Huberman points out how, unlike the members of the aristocracy who produced representations of themselves designed to celebrate and reinforce their power and lineage, the ordinary people were often pushed into the background. The result, he says, was that they were not “envisagés”, a play on words suggesting that they were not “given a face”.15
- 16 In works like Eisenstein’s October (1928) or Rosellini’s Germany – Year Zero (1948), it is the “ext (...)
- 17 Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 15.
- 18 “hors-cadre, hors-champ de la représentation classique” (ibid., p. 107). My translations throughout
20However, the representation of the “people” changes radically with the invention of photography in the 19th century and especially with the emergence of film. An entire section of the book is given over to an analysis of how film-makers like Sergueï Eisenstein and Roberto Rossellini, in choosing to film “le petit peuple” (the common people), actively subvert the star system,16 focusing instead on those who would otherwise have been “figurants” (extras), who, Didi-Huberman says, are systematically “sous-exposés” (under-exposed, under-exhibited).17 His interest in alternatives to the Hollywood model leads him to examine what happens in the background of the image, even imagining what is going on outside the frame, off-screen.18
- 19 “Comme il n’y a pas d’appareils optiques sans appareils institutionnels, il n’y a pas de cadres est (...)
21This issue of focus – in every sense of the word – underlines the political nature of the way the image is framed, especially in terms of who we see where in the frame. Thus, as Didi-Huberman reminds us, “[j]ust as there is no optical apparatus without an institutional apparatus, so there are no aesthetic frames without political frames”.19
- 20 “Où trouver l’archive de ceux dont on ne veut rien consigner, ceux dont on veut quelquefois tuer la (...)
- 21 “la sous-exposition, la censure, l’abandon, le mépris” (ibid.).
22Much of what Didi-Huberman is saying could very easily be applied to hostile representations of Ulster-Scots culture. As everyone knows, Ulster-Scots culture has been the object of sustained attack over the years. The attack has been root and branch, in that everything connected with it is alleged to have been invented ex nihilo. Basically, or so its enemies say, Ulster-Scots culture is fake, it does not exist. Given what we have said above, this denial is patently a misrepresentation. Didi-Huberman’s work is therefore of immediate relevance since it is premised on a number of fundamental questions such as: “Where do you find the archive of those about whom people do not wish to leave any trace, those whose very memory people sometimes wish to kill?”.20 He outlines the strategies used to this end: “under-exposure, censorship, abandonment, contempt”.21 All of these terms can be applied to the systematic campaigns of denigration that have been directed at the Ulster-Scots community by that highly vocal minority who have tried to obliterate the “very memory” of Ulster-Scots culture by suggesting that there is no culture in the first place.
- 22 “La sous-exposition nous prive des moyens pour voir, tout simplement, ce dont il pourrait être ques (...)
23This can manifest itself by choosing simply not to put the Ulster Scot into the frame. Moving them off-screen, both literally and figuratively, makes it easier to forget them, the objective perhaps being that, in the end, they may eventually even “forget themselves”. Similarly, down-playing the Ulster-Scots characteristics of a given individual or event will push the viewer’s gaze off in an entirely different direction. As Didi-Huberman puts it: “Quite simply, under-exposure deprives us of the means to see what might be there to be seen”.22
24Alternatively, there can be a hyper-focus on certain selected episodes of history. As we will see, this strategy of “over-exposure” can prove to be just as damaging as the strategy of invisibilisation.
- 23 Julien Lefort-Favreau, “Sauver les peuples. Peuples exposés, peuples figurants. L’œil de l’histoire(...)
- 24 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London, Faber, 1969, p. 24.
25Beyond offering a number of conceptual tools with which to tackle the issue of the attempted side-lining and invisibilisation of Ulster-Scots culture by some elements within Irish society, Didi-Huberman’s work points to frames that allow us to address what one commentator on his work has called a “déficit de représentation”.23 By identifying the techniques used to “censor” Ulster-Scots content, people will be encouraged to examine accepted versions of history – written and visual – more aggressively, challenging what Rudolf Arnheim calls “the pictured space”24 from an explicitly Ulster-Scots perspective. Re-examining material produced in or about Ulster-Scots areas with systematic suspicion will allow us to uncover Ulster-Scots related content that has hitherto been made invisible. In its turn, this will open up further areas of research for the future.
An example of over-exposure
26One of the best examples of what Didi-Huberman calls “over-exposure” is to be found in representations of the 1798 Rising. In July 1912, at the very height of the crisis around the third Home Rule Bill, an article appeared in The Irish Review, a “monthly magazine of literature, art and science”, that sought to clarify how this key event should be read. Although the author of the article signs himself “An Ulster Scot”, he is clearly sympathetic to the nationalist cause. However, according to him, “Ulster Scot” is now “the favourite nomenclature adopted by the Anti-Irish Ulsterman”:
- 25 An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of North-East Ulster”, The Irish Review, vol. 2, no. 17, July 1912, p. (...)
In my youth the Unionists of the North-east corner of Ulster were contented with the name “Ulstermen”, “North-of-Ireland” men, or even “Scotch-Irish”, but […] “Ulster Scots” now appears to be the favourite term.25
27The author goes on to say something of the particular significance that this term had taken on at the period in the area of politics and identity:
- 26 Ibid., p. 229.
I had a discussion with a typical Ulster Unionist the other day, in which he refused to label himself as Irish, Scotch, English, or Welsh, or anything else but an “Ulster Scot”. His family has resided in Ireland […], probably from the beginning of the 17th century […]; but in his estimation he was still an alien in Ireland!26
- 27 Ibid.
28The fact that “Ulster Scot” had become the standard way of referring to this group indicates that an “imagined community” existed that was now recognised both inside and outside that community. The author even goes as far as to claim that “the foregoing truly represents the opinions of three-fourths of the Protesants Unionists [sic] of Ulster”.27 In other words, the notion of “Ulster-Scottishness” has become so potent as an identity marker that it is capable of absorbing people well beyond the demographic confines of the core Ulster Presbyterian community. He would appear to be saying that Ulster-Scottishness has succeeded in detaching itself – at least partially – from any denominational base to become a broad, catch-all term for radical political opposition to the Home Rule project.
29It is clearly the success of the Ulster-Scots project that explains why it has to be attacked and discredited with all the virulence the author can muster.
- 28 Ibid., p. 230.
- 29 Clearly, the allegations have not changed one iota over the course of the intervening century.
30Unsurprisingly, the attack is not centred on the political dimension of the Ulster Scot. Rather the focus of the attack is on what the author identifies as “the old irreconcilable, unreasonable, uncharitable, bigoted, Orange attitude”28 he allegedly exemplifies. This dismissal of the Ulster Scots as pathologically sectarian and reactionary – a well-worn propaganda technique – is immediately tied in to a representation of them as uncultivated boors, hostile to the linguistic and literary revival.29
31However, there is a ray of hope: history. The only problem is that, according to the author:
- 30 An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of North-East Ulster”, p. 233.
History […] is a matter of which the “Ulster Scot” is profoundly and amazingly ignorant. I will wager that there is no class of people in the civilised world so ignorant of their country’s history as they are. If they did read and study the history of their country, there would be more, as in ’98, on the Nationalist side.30
- 31 James Campbell, The Poems and Songs of James Campbell of Ballynure, John Fullarton (ed.), Ballyclar (...)
- 32 James Seaton Reid, W. D. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, London, Whitaker an (...)
- 33 W. G. Lyttle’s Betsy Gray; or, Hearts of Down, A Tale of ’98 appeared in episodes in the North Down (...)
32Anyone who takes the time to look at what people belonging to the Ulster-Scots community produced in the course of the 19th century on the question of their support for the United Irishmen will soon realise that they are not, as this author so dismissively states, “profoundly and amazingly ignorant” of their history. Whether it is in a poem like “Willie Wark’s Song” (written in 1814 and republished in 1870) by the former United Irishman, James Campbell,31 or the examination of the period in the third volume of James Seaton Reid’s, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1853),32 or again in the pages of a Kailyard novel like Betsy Gray; or, Hearts of Down, A Tale of ’98 by W. G. Lyttle (1885-1886),33 it is obvious that the community made repeated efforts to come to terms with its involvement in the Rising across the century and in a variety of genres.
- 34 For a discussion of the political choices of the Ulster-Scots community over the course of the cent (...)
- 35 Thomas Hamilton, History of the Irish Presbyterian Church, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clarke, London, Hamil (...)
33The problem did not lie in the ignorance of history. The problem was the interpretation of history.34 The sea change in the political orientation of a large proportion of the Ulster-Scots community in the aftermath of the Rising meant that by the Home Rule period they looked back at the choices of their ancestors with disbelief. Rev. Thomas Hamilton’s History of the Irish Presbyterian Church, published in 1886, at the height of the first phase of the Home Rule crisis, was typical of the revised Presbyterian reading of the Rising as “a miserable fiasco”.35
34Nationalist and especially republican history, on the other hand, was determined to incorporate the Ulster Scot into the body of the Irish narrative. But, in line with The Irish Review article, that incorporation depended on the Ulster Scot fitting in with a carefully managed script.
- 36 For a lively exploration of the sometimes violent events around the 1898 commemoration of Betsy Gra (...)
35Thus, although the Ulster Scots who had joined the United Irishmen were – briefly – allowed to take on a star role in the nationalist version of the 1798 Rising, their descendants would quietly disappear again into the background in the 19th century when they allowed themselves to be seduced by a unionist agenda. This would not prevent nationalism using 1898 to celebrate the role played by the Ulster Scots a hundred years before, much to the annoyance of their descendants.36
36In other words, the Ulster-Scots community is celebrated chiefly – exclusively? – when they are represented as – regional – heroes of a “dominant” Irish national narrative. However, starring in the odd episode of someone else’s primary narrative can come at a price. Hyper-focus on such fragments imposes a reduced stature on the Ulster-Scots story. In this case, the metanarrative is Irish. But, as we have already seen, exactly the same could be said for the Scots, American or British narratives. Since the representation is fragmentary, the suggestion is that the culture itself must be fragmentary. It is impossible to ignore the sharp contrast between the resulting episodic nature of Ulster-Scots history and the continuum of Irish history stretching back into prehistory. The result is that although the Ulster Scots may be given star roles in a few selected episodes, they spend most of their time as a peuple figurant, or, when they are not actually pushed outside the frame, have their Ulster-Scots backstory so watered down, so “under-exposed”, as to reduce it to nothing more than a genealogical curiosity.
37This is what happens in the following example.
An example of under-exposure
- 37 See Maria Luddy, “Isabella M. S. Tod, 1836-1896”, in Women, Power, and Consciousness in 19th-centur (...)
38Isabella Tod was one of the key figures in Belfast in the closing decades of the 19th century. Tod was born in Edinburgh in 1836. Her father was a Scot and her mother belonged to a well-known Presbyterian family in County Monaghan. When her father died, her mother returned to Ireland, settling in Belfast where she was to live for the rest of her life. Tod was active in a broad range of areas. She was deeply involved in the Temperance movement, fighting the social evils associated with drink. She was also committed to women’s education and was responsible for the creation of a number of schools for girls across Ireland. However, she is perhaps best known for her involvement in the movement for women’s suffrage, helping to found the North of Ireland Women’s Suffrage Association.37
- 38 Isabella Tod: Ulster’s Forgotten Radical, directed by Michael Fanning, Below the Radar, 2013, 30 mi (...)
- 39 The Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund was set up as part of Northern Ireland Screen in 2011. It provides (...)
39A 30-minute documentary film on her life was shown in 2013 on BBC 2 NI, entitled Isabella Tod: Ulster’s Forgotten Radical.38 In it, the presenter, Margaret Mountford, described as a “former Apprentice star”, takes the viewer through Isabella Tod’s life story. People watching the programme would have noticed that the programme had received a good part of its funding from the newly-created Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund (USBF),39 a fact which might have suggested that the documentary would have a strong Ulster-Scots focus. And indeed, near the start of the film (01.48), Ms. Mountford says that Isabella Tod “was of Ulster-Scots background and was a Presbyterian, lived in Belfast”, continuing, “I’m of Ulster-Scots background and brought up as a Presbyterian in Holywood”. That, however, will be the only time in this 30-minute programme that we will hear the term “Ulster-Scots” used.
40And yet, there is indeed an Ulster-Scots story to be told.
41An obituary in The Northern Whig (9 December 1896) underlines Tod’s strong attachment to both her Irish and Scottish roots:
- 40 “Death of Miss Isabella M. S. Tod”, The Northern Whig, 9 December 1896.
It was with pride she recalled how one of her maternal ancestors signed at Holywood in 1646 the copy of the Solemn League and Covenant sent from Scotland to those who, for conscience sake, had fled to Ireland and she would point out his signature, bold and purposelike, amongst those historic names.40
If Tod saw these links between Ulster and Scotland as being so important it is because they form the very basis of her conception of Britishness.
42Tod was indeed a committed unionist. Although she had been a liberal all her life, like the majority of Ulster liberals, she was horrified by Gladstone’s decision to support Home Rule. She spent the last ten years of her life defending the unionist cause, founding the Liberal Women’s Unionist Association in Belfast in 1886. Although this is mentioned in passing in the closing few minutes of the film (24.48), the viewer is given no real idea about the origins and depth of her commitment to the unionist cause.
- 41 Isabella M. S. Tod, “Myth and Fact”, The Liberal Unionist, 1 June 1887, p. 146-147.
43Tod wrote a number of essays defending the Union, sometimes in very provocative terms. One of these, entitled “Myth and Fact”, was written for The Liberal Unionist, published in June 1887.41 In this text, Tod explicitly focuses her attention on the “intercourse between the north of Ireland and the south and west of Scotland and north of England”. She identifies this as the fundamental axis on which what she sees as the inextricable links between the two islands have been built. Interestingly, whereas the film repeatedly refers to her as a “staunch Presbyterian”, and only once as a “Liberal Unionist”, she herself does not focus on the religious dimension of her identity. Rather, she prefers to ignore any reference to religious issues, claiming that the specific relationship between Ulster and Scotland had been going on “not for two hundred years, but two thousand”.
44Like many unionists of the period, she says that, culturally, she is incapable of choosing between “the Celts and Catholics of Ireland” and “the Saxons and Protestants of Great Britain”, since she considers both, equally, as her “countrymen” within the United Kingdom. Although she will continue to look with “warmest affection” on Ireland, she sees herself as belonging to what she calls “a great mixed nation”, the United Kingdom, open to what she calls “the vast tidal waves of the world’s thought”.
45However, in the film, we do not hear a word about any of that. Those framing the information push us to look primarily at variations on the theme of her work as a reformer. And although the programme is both interesting and informative in what it has to say on that score, that is only a part of her story. The parts of the story that are pushed off-screen – into the hors-champ –, the areas that are, if not invisible, at least opaque, are the reasons for her commitment to a radical unionist agenda and her attachment to her Ulster-Scots roots. The result is that the viewer comes away with a distorted image of her sense of identity and political commitment. Despite the fact that from 1886 on, Tod devoted most of her energy to defending the Union, the viewer is left with the impression that it was her feminism and not her unionism that counted for her and that her Ulster-Scottishness was nothing more than an accident of birth.
“a de-framing that makes room for the imagination”42
- 42 “un décadrage laissant place à l’imagination” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 77).
46According to Didi-Huberman, both of these strategies – under-exposure and over-exposure – are equally damaging to the representation of those communities who are systematically privées d’image (deprived of an image). Both ensure that the community is not envisagée, meaning that it remains faceless.
47Given the weight of prejudice against the tradition, how, therefore, do we arrive at a satisfactory “framing” of the Ulster Scots, one that will do justice to the role they have played in Ulster society over the years?
- 43 For an overview of the main players in the contemporary Ulster-Scots sector, see Wesley Hutchinson, (...)
- 44 To date, the Ulster-Scots Community Network has published two volumes of work by upcoming Ulster-Sc (...)
- 45 See https://discoverulsterscots.com.
- 46 As an example of recent interesting work in film, see: This Oul Fermin Life, directed by Tristan Cr (...)
- 47 One of the volumes in this four-volume collection was A. G. Lyttle’s independently published biogra (...)
48There is of course the work that has been going on in the context of the revival of interest in Ulster-Scots since the 1990s and which continues to embed Ulster-Scots culture within the community.43 Recent examples in the public sphere are to be found in the Ulster-Scots Community Network’s encouragement to new writing in Ulster-Scots,44 or in the remarkable site, “Discover Ulster-Scots”, hosted by the Ulster-Scots Agency,45 or again in the on-going work of the Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund which has been playing a proactive role in promoting increasingly targeted Ulster-Scots material both for television and radio and as a digital resource available online to a global audience.46 This structured, strategic work is complemented by initiatives in the private sphere. Given the reluctance of publishers to feature material on or in Ulster-Scots – a symptom of what is clearly systemic under-exposure –, what appears depends very largely on the determination of individuals to put material into the public domain. A recent example of this is to be found in the four volumes on the life and work of the Ulster-Scots newspaperman and performer of the end of the 19th century, Wesley Greenhill Lyttle.47
49As the last example clearly illustrates, there is a vast amount of Ulster-Scots material that remains to be examined. However, beyond bringing to the public’s attention material that is recognisably Ulster-Scots, there is also a need to cast the net wider, seeking out evidence of what might be called the “ghostly presence” of the Ulster Scots in work that does not specifically focus on them.
50Once again, Didi-Huberman’s comments are useful for what they have to say about the need to “look” at what is shown from a different perspective by questioning the way information is framed:
- 48 “Le plus simple des jeux par lesquels l’appareil photographique met en crise l’appareil institution (...)
The simplest strategy by which the camera (l’appareil photographique) destabilises the institutional machinery (l’appareil institutionnel) is doubtless by playing with frames. All it takes is to shift the frame ever so slightly – whether on purpose or not –, all it takes is to pull back or move in just a little too much in order to reveal, in the system, the excesses of the system.48
51What we need, he says, is what he calls “a de-framing that makes room for the imagination”.
- 49 The same could of course be said for a photographic archive.
52A remark like this can be read as an incitation to the viewer to re-frame the image, for example, by homing in on a particular segment, to look below the surface of the image, interrogating it with the imagination, asking who we are really looking at. This is particularly significant with regard to what Didi-Huberman calls, a “cinéma d’archives”49 that allows us to
- 50 “[…] remonter l’histoire à la recherche de visages perdus, je veux dire les visages qui ont aujourd (...)
[…] go back through history in search of lost faces, I mean faces that today no longer have a name, faces which look out at us powerless and mute, but which have lost nothing of their force when we see them moving in the trembling light of films that have been damaged by time.50
- 51 The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young, directed by Mal Marken, Imagine Media Productions Limited (...)
- 52 The exhibition, “With an Artist’s Eye: The Photography of Mary Alice Young of Galgorm Castle, Bally (...)
53A perfect illustration of what this might involve if applied to the sphere of Ulster-Scots studies can be found in a recent film51 and exhibition52 around the work of a remarkable woman photographer working at the Home Rule period, Mary Alice Young.
Revealing images
- 53 Gordon Lucy describes the Youngs as “an extremely influential and well-known County Antrim family”, (...)
- 54 The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young provides details on how PRONI restored and digitised the e (...)
54Mary Alice Young was born in Dundarave, near Bushmills in 1867. Her family, the Macnaghtens, could trace their presence in the area back to the end of the 16th century when their ancestor, John Macnaughten (Shane Dhu), moved there from Argyll, Scotland. In 1893, she married William R. Young, a Presbyterian linen merchant and committed unionist politician from Galgorm, outside Ballymena, where she was to live for the rest of her life.53 Over the course of a quarter of a century between 1890 and the start of the First World War, Mary Alice Young produced an extraordinary body of work consisting of some 1,100 plate-glass photographs, in which she records the life of Galgorm Castle, the estate and the surrounding countryside.54 Many of the photos are of family members, some staged, some taken in the course of their day-to-day activities. There are still lives and even some trick photography in which Young is clearly experimenting with the medium’s possibilities. However, some of the most intriguing photos are of the people working on the estate, the gardeners, the game keepers and the stable boys, or again those of the local community in Galgorm village going about their everyday lives. It is these images which are of the greatest interest from an Ulster-Scots perspective.
- 55 http://census.nationalarchives.ie
- 56 Not counting the odd member of structures like the United Free Church of Scotland, classified under (...)
- 57 See also the remarks in The Irish Review article examined above (An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of Nor (...)
- 58 See, for example, “Lecture at Ballyeaston”, Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, 30 May 1914, which gives an (...)
- 59 For example, Bab M’Keen, “Between Oorsel’s. Things in General. Hame Rule in Parteeclar”, The Ballym (...)
- 60 See above, note 7.
- 61 See “C.P.A. Excursion to Ayr”, The Northern Whig, 30 June 1909.
55The religious statistics in the 1911 Census show that Presbyterians made up just over 50% of the population of County Antrim as a whole.55 However, in areas such as Galgorm, the concentration was much higher. In the parish of Ahoghill where Galgorm is situated, the Census recorded 490 Roman Catholics, 787 Episcopalians and 4,108 Presbyterians.56 If Presbyterianism is taken as one of the key markers of an Ulster-Scots identity, this would suggest that a large proportion of the ordinary people that feature in Young’s images could be seen as Ulster Scots.57 Indeed, given the “construction” of Ulster-Scots identity that had been on-going since the start of the Home Rule crisis (see above), many of them would have identified themselves as such. These are the people who were attending the lectures on Scottish literature and history that were being held regularly in the local schools and church halls in the area,58 the people who would have read the regular columns in Ulster-Scots by Bab M’Keen in The Ballymena Observer,59 the people who would have enjoyed the work of local poets like Adam Lynn and Thomas Given writing in Ulster-Scots,60 the people who would have taken the day trips to the “land of Burns” to see for themselves the places mentioned in the poems that formed such an integral part of their cultural baggage.61
- 62 Mary Alice Young, The Recollections of Mary Alice Young, née Macnaghten (1867-1946) of Dundarave an (...)
- 63 Ibid., p. 53.
- 64 Ibid., p. 29.
- 65 T. O’H., “Heroes of the Siege of Derry”, Irish Independent, 21 November 1932. In the preface to his (...)
56In her autobiography,62 Mary Alice Young never makes any reference to herself as having any personal sense of an Ulster-Scots identity. However, she must have been keenly aware of the issues involved. For a start, she was clearly sensitive to the presence of the Ulster-Scots vernacular spoken throughout the community in which she was so deeply involved. Thus, in her autobiography she quotes one of the local children running home to tell his mother that she had failed in her attempt to get a seat on the Rural District Council, saying: “Ma, Mary Alice is oot!”.63 Even within her immediate family circle, Ulster-Scots issues are very much to the fore. According to the Irish Independent, her husband, William R. Young – with whom she tells us she spent “forty years of happiness”64 –, described himself specifically as “an Ulster Scot”, clearly as important a part of his identity as his being a “strong Unionist”.65
- 66 As Richard Howells suggests, “a photograph can be indicative of a wider, cultural way of seeing the (...)
- 67 The author and Études irlandaises would like to thank Mr. Christopher Brooke, the copyright holder (...)
57In other words, although she may not have set out explicitly to photograph the Ulster-Scots community as such, when she photographs the everyday life of the estate and the village around her, she cannot help but show people who belong to that community. Although the photos were never intended for publication and although they were not conceived with a view to promoting an Ulster-Scots agenda, the fact remains that an important section of her work opens a window on to the everyday life of a thriving Ulster-Scots community.66 In many ways therefore, Mary Alice Young is a go-between, a vector “revealing” a hitherto hidden community, almost despite herself (see fig. 1 and 2).67
58Her photographs invite us to ask ourselves questions about who we are looking at, who is actually in the frame. We can, of course, continue to look at the photos of the workers on the estate or in the village as belonging to the “local community”, but if we do we limit our analysis largely to issues of place, gender and class. This ignores the fact that a considerable proportion of that community would have seen itself as Ulster-Scots, with all the cultural and political attributes that that implies. That is precisely why these images are of such interest. When we look at them from this perspective, it emerges that this supposedly “invisible” Ulster-Scots community is in fact constantly present, being “revealed” throughout the work, sometimes as figurants in the background, on the edges of the image, sometimes right in the centre of the image, going about their everyday lives. These photographs, by inviting us to envisager ordinary Ulster Scots, an example of le petit peuple Didi-Huberman focuses on in his text, will help us re-imagine our image of the community as a whole by allowing us – literally – to “see” them in a broader historical perspective.
Fig. 1 – Photograph by Mary Alice Young of six people (one woman and five men) gathering potatoes.
PRONI catalogue reference number: D3027/8/C/7/14.
Fig. 2 – Photograph by Mary Alice Young of two men breaking stones at the roadside. A young barefoot boy is seated to the right. The young boy is looking directly at the camera with a sulking expression.
PRONI catalogue reference number: D3027/8/C/3/11.
Conclusion
- 68 “[…] le spectateur peut se figurer un devenir politique à travers les images qu’il perçoit, percept (...)
- 69 In the absence of such stimuli, the culture will be faced with long-term decline – the “pessimism” (...)
59When it comes to the consolidation of a cultural awareness, historical images are a most valuable resource. Julien Lefort-Favreau, talking about Didi-Huberman’s analysis of “photographic traces”, says: “[…] the viewer can imagine a political future for himself through the images he sees, a sensory perception that can also spark off political action”.68 This idea is of fundamental importance in that it points to the performative nature of such images. “Seeing”, “imaging”, I would add “imagining” what has been done within the Ulster-Scots community in the past and that has hitherto been, for whatever reason, invisible will inevitably stimulate (re-)action in the present.69 Positive responses to the “representation deficit” the Ulster-Scots tradition suffers from cannot emerge if we do not provide serious, objective evidence of the vitality of the culture in the past. This in turn involves questioning material that has yet to be identified as belonging to a possible Ulster-Scots archive. Re-framing our analysis of such material with a view to identifying hitherto invisible traces of an Ulster-Scots past can be the first stage in transforming those traces into a projected future.
Notes
1 Colonel A. K. M’Clure, “Scotch-Irish Achievement”, in The Scotch-Irish in America: Proceedings of the Scotch-Irish Congress at Columbia, Tennessee, May 8-11, 1889, A. C. Floyd, Lucius Frierson, Robert Pillow (eds.), Cincinnati, R. Clarke & Co., 1889, p. 178.
2 A. C. Floyd, “The Scotch-Irish Congress, Its Objects and Results”, in The Scotch-Irish in America…, p. 3.
3 This issue comes up again in two talks given in Edinburgh (1911) and Belfast (1912) by the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, Whitelaw Reid. These talks were subsequently published as The Scot in America and the Ulster Scot, London, Macmillan & Co., 1912. Reid explains that, if they are to rectify the dominant – allegedly Puritan-centred – historiography, the Scots and the Ulster Scots need to put forward a specifically “Scotch-Irish” reading of American history.
4 W. T. Latimer, A History of the Irish Presbyterians, Belfast, J. Cleeland and Edinburgh, R. W. Hunter, 1893. For the links between Presbyterian Church history and the emergence of an Ulster-Scots identity, see Andrew R. Holmes, “Presbyterian Religion, Historiography, and Ulster Scots Identity, c. 1800 to 1914”, The Historical Journal, vol. 52, no. 3, 2009, p. 615-640.
5 Alexander G. Lecky, In the Days of the Laggan Presbytery, Belfast, Davison & M’Cormack, 1908.
6 See, for example, An Account of the Life of Robert Cunningham, A. M., Minister of Holywood in Ireland, 1615-1636, Clement Edwards Pike (ed.), Belfast, Mayne & Boyd, 1897.
7 Patrick, Samuel Fee and Thomas Given, Poems from College and Country, by Three Brothers, Thomas Given (ed.), Belfast, W. & G. Baird Ltd., 1900, and Adam Lynn, Random Rhymes frae Cullybackey, Belfast, W. & G. Baird Ltd., 1911.
8 W. G. Lyttle, Sons of the Sod [1886], Bangor, Books Ulster, 2005.
9 Archibald McIlroy, The Auld Meetin’-Hoose Green, Belfast, M’Caw, Stevenson & Orr, 1898.
10 John Harrison, The Scot in Ulster: Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster, Edinburgh – London, W. Blackwood and Sons, 1888.
11 Publishing in New York and Princeton, authors such as Charles A. Hanna, author of the two-volume, The Scotch-Irish, or The Scot in North Britain, North Ireland and North America (New York – London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), or Henry Jones Ford, author of The Scotch-Irish in America (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1915), contributed a great deal to our image of the Ulster Scot by showing the influence of Ulster-Scots settlers on the construction of America.
12 For an examination of how Ulster-Scots history and culture were used in support of the unionist campaign against Home Rule, see https://www.makingnorthernireland.co.uk.
13 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’œil de l’histoire, vol. IV, Peuples exposés, peuples figurants, Paris, Minuit, 2012.
14 Ibid., p. 141-144. The film is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TwV4uCrDhY&t=2s.
15 Ibid., p. 57.
16 In works like Eisenstein’s October (1928) or Rosellini’s Germany – Year Zero (1948), it is the “extras” that take centre stage.
17 Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 15.
18 “hors-cadre, hors-champ de la représentation classique” (ibid., p. 107). My translations throughout.
19 “Comme il n’y a pas d’appareils optiques sans appareils institutionnels, il n’y a pas de cadres esthétiques sans cadres politiques” (ibid., p. 72).
20 “Où trouver l’archive de ceux dont on ne veut rien consigner, ceux dont on veut quelquefois tuer la mémoire même?” (ibid., p. 33).
21 “la sous-exposition, la censure, l’abandon, le mépris” (ibid.).
22 “La sous-exposition nous prive des moyens pour voir, tout simplement, ce dont il pourrait être question” (ibid., p. 15).
23 Julien Lefort-Favreau, “Sauver les peuples. Peuples exposés, peuples figurants. L’œil de l’histoire, 4, de Georges Didi-Huberman, Minuit, ‘Paradoxe’; Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? d’Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiai, Jacques Rancière, La fabrique éditions”, Spirale, no. 251, winter 2015, Dans l’œil de l’histoire, Guylaine Massoutre, Manon Plante (eds.), p. 42.
24 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London, Faber, 1969, p. 24.
25 An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of North-East Ulster”, The Irish Review, vol. 2, no. 17, July 1912, p. 228.
26 Ibid., p. 229.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 230.
29 Clearly, the allegations have not changed one iota over the course of the intervening century.
30 An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of North-East Ulster”, p. 233.
31 James Campbell, The Poems and Songs of James Campbell of Ballynure, John Fullarton (ed.), Ballyclare, E. Corry, 1870, p. 100-101.
32 James Seaton Reid, W. D. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, London, Whitaker and Co., Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, Glasgow, Maurice Ogle & Son, Belfast, H. Greer and Dublin, W. M. Curry & Co., 1853, vol. III, p. 411-432.
33 W. G. Lyttle’s Betsy Gray; or, Hearts of Down, A Tale of ’98 appeared in episodes in the North Down Herald between November 1885 and September 1886. It was later published in book form.
34 For a discussion of the political choices of the Ulster-Scots community over the course of the centuries, see James Greer, Graham Walker, Ulster-Scots’ Contribution to Political Thought, Belfast, Queen’s University and The Department for Communities, n.d.
35 Thomas Hamilton, History of the Irish Presbyterian Church, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clarke, London, Hamilton, Adams and Co., Dublin, G. Herbert and New York, Scribner and Welford, 1886, p. 139.
36 For a lively exploration of the sometimes violent events around the 1898 commemoration of Betsy Gray, the heroine of the above-mentioned novel by Lyttle, see Jack McCoy, Ulster’s Joan of Arc, An Examination of the Betsy Gray Story, Bangor, North Down Borough Council Visitors and Heritage Centre, 1987, p. 16-35.
37 See Maria Luddy, “Isabella M. S. Tod, 1836-1896”, in Women, Power, and Consciousness in 19th-century Ireland, Mary Cullen, Maria Luddy (eds.), Dublin, Attic, 1995, p. 197-230. For a wide-ranging discussion of the complexities of Tod’s political choices, see Heloise Brown, “An Alternative Imperialism: Isabella Tod, Internationalist and ‘Good Liberal Unionist’”, Gender & History, vol. 10, no. 3, November 1998, p. 358–380.
38 Isabella Tod: Ulster’s Forgotten Radical, directed by Michael Fanning, Below the Radar, 2013, 30 min. The documentary was screened on BBC 2 NI on 27 October 2013. See: https://www.northernirelandscreen.co.uk/news/isabella-tod-ulsters-forgotten-radical-on-bbc-two-ni.
39 The Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund was set up as part of Northern Ireland Screen in 2011. It provides production and development funding for film and television projects focused on Ulster-Scots heritage, culture and language. It is increasingly committed to funding digital content designed to make Ulster-Scots material available online to a world-wide audience. See: https://northernirelandscreen.co.uk/ulster-scots-broadcast-fund.
40 “Death of Miss Isabella M. S. Tod”, The Northern Whig, 9 December 1896.
41 Isabella M. S. Tod, “Myth and Fact”, The Liberal Unionist, 1 June 1887, p. 146-147.
42 “un décadrage laissant place à l’imagination” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 77).
43 For an overview of the main players in the contemporary Ulster-Scots sector, see Wesley Hutchinson, “Introduction”, in Tracing the Ulster-Scots Imagination, Belfast, Ulster University, 2018, p. 1-28.
44 To date, the Ulster-Scots Community Network has published two volumes of work by upcoming Ulster-Scots writers: Yarns, Celebrating Contemporary Writing in Ulster-Scots and Scots, Belfast, Ulster-Scots Agency, n.d. [2022 and 2023].
45 See https://discoverulsterscots.com.
46 As an example of recent interesting work in film, see: This Oul Fermin Life, directed by Tristan Crowe, Sub-Culture Production, 2022, 6 min. 49, a dramatisation of a poem by Ulster-Scots poet, Charlie Gillen, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc05f5Gs_MI. The digital content funded by the USBF is designed to consolidate the presence of Ulster-Scots within the community, particularly at different levels of the school curriculum. A good deal of USBF output is now available on the “Discover Ulster-Scots” platform (see above).
47 One of the volumes in this four-volume collection was A. G. Lyttle’s independently published biography of his great-grandfather, Wesley Greenhill Lyttle, The Storyteller, that came out in November 2021.
48 “Le plus simple des jeux par lesquels l’appareil photographique met en crise l’appareil institutionnel, c’est sans doute le jeu du cadre. Il suffit de décaler à peine – volontairement ou non –, il suffit de s’éloigner ou de s’approcher un peu trop pour voir surgir, dans le système, l’excès du système” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 77).
49 The same could of course be said for a photographic archive.
50 “[…] remonter l’histoire à la recherche de visages perdus, je veux dire les visages qui ont aujourd’hui perdu leur nom, qui s’offrent à nous dans l’impouvoir et la mutité, mais qui n’ont rien perdu de leur force lorsqu’on les regarde se mouvoir dans la lumière tremblante de pellicules abîmées par le temps” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 148). This is exactly what the Swiss director and producer, Hansmartin Siegrist, explained at the Cinémathèque suisse (Lausanne, 17 January 2023) at a showing of Lichtspieler (2022), his recent documentary on François-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, the pioneer Swiss cinematographer. Siegrist explained how, when the researchers were working on some of the crowd scenes Lavanchy-Clarke had shot, the identification of just one person on screen often allowed them to reconstruct an entire network of otherwise anonymous people present in the shot.
51 The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young, directed by Mal Marken, Imagine Media Productions Limited, colour, 30 min., 2022, first screened on BBC 2 NI, 29 January 2023. The film is available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001htzs/the-lost-photographs-of-mary-alice-young. See also: https://northernirelandscreen.co.uk/news/ulster-scots-broadcast-fund/the-lost-photographs-of-mary-alice-young-are-explored-in-a-new-ulster-scots-broadcast-fund-documentary-on-bbc-two-ni.
52 The exhibition, “With an Artist’s Eye: The Photography of Mary Alice Young of Galgorm Castle, Ballymena”, was curated by Jayne Clarke as part of a collaboration with the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and Christopher Brooke of Galgorm Castle, the copyright holder of the Mary Alice Young Collection. It ran from 18 November 2022 to 4 February 2023 in the Braid, Mid-Antrim Museum, Ballymena before transferring to PRONI in Belfast.
53 Gordon Lucy describes the Youngs as “an extremely influential and well-known County Antrim family”, William R. Young’s father having been “the first Presbyterian to be appointed to the Irish Privy Council” (William R. Young, Fighters of Derry, Gordon Lucy (ed.), n.p., Books Ulster, 2016, p. iii). One of William’s brothers, “Orange” George, was commander of the mid-Antrim Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), while his sister, Rose, aka Róis Ní Ógáin, was an Irish language scholar, compiler of the Duanaire Gaedhilge (Baile Átha Cliath, Comhluct Oideachais na h-Éireann, 1921) who was close friends with Roger Casement and Douglas Hyde.
54 The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young provides details on how PRONI restored and digitised the entire collection of Young’s photographs.
55 http://census.nationalarchives.ie
56 Not counting the odd member of structures like the United Free Church of Scotland, classified under “other denominations”.
57 See also the remarks in The Irish Review article examined above (An Ulster Scot, “The Denial of North-East Ulster”) in which the author, hostile to the Ulster-Scots agenda, says that “three-fourths of the Protesants Unionists [sic] of Ulster” identified as Ulster Scots.
58 See, for example, “Lecture at Ballyeaston”, Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, 30 May 1914, which gives an account of a lecture on Robert Burns in First Ballyeaston Presbyterian Church delivered to the members the G Company Central Antrim Regiment of the recently formed UVF.
59 For example, Bab M’Keen, “Between Oorsel’s. Things in General. Hame Rule in Parteeclar”, The Ballymena Observer, 27 April 1914. For a detailed analysis of this text, see https://www.makingnorthernireland.co.uk, Module 3, Third Home Rule Bill, “Bab M’Keen”.
60 See above, note 7.
61 See “C.P.A. Excursion to Ayr”, The Northern Whig, 30 June 1909.
62 Mary Alice Young, The Recollections of Mary Alice Young, née Macnaghten (1867-1946) of Dundarave and Galgorm, County Antrim, Eull Dunlop (ed.), Ballymena, Mid-Antrim Historical Group, n.d. [1997?].
63 Ibid., p. 53.
64 Ibid., p. 29.
65 T. O’H., “Heroes of the Siege of Derry”, Irish Independent, 21 November 1932. In the preface to his Fighters of Derry (1932), Young went as far as to argue that, during the siege, the successful defence of the city was primarily due to the “dogged” resistance of the “Ulster Scot” (William R. Young, preface to Fighters of Derry, p. ix).
66 As Richard Howells suggests, “a photograph can be indicative of a wider, cultural way of seeing the world than the photographer had imagined” (Richard Howells, Visual Culture, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003, p. 167).
67 The author and Études irlandaises would like to thank Mr. Christopher Brooke, the copyright holder of the Mary Alice Young Collection, and the Deputy Keeper of the Records, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), for permission to reproduce these photographs.
68 “[…] le spectateur peut se figurer un devenir politique à travers les images qu’il perçoit, perception sensible qui peut également induire des actions politiques” (Julien Lefort-Favreau, “Sauver les peuples…”, p. 42).
69 In the absence of such stimuli, the culture will be faced with long-term decline – the “pessimism” Didi-Huberman sees engendered by the techniques of under-exposure (Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés…, p. 33).
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
Titre | Fig. 1 – Photograph by Mary Alice Young of six people (one woman and five men) gathering potatoes. |
---|---|
Crédits | PRONI catalogue reference number: D3027/8/C/7/14. |
URL | http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/17309/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 119k |
Titre | Fig. 2 – Photograph by Mary Alice Young of two men breaking stones at the roadside. A young barefoot boy is seated to the right. The young boy is looking directly at the camera with a sulking expression. |
Crédits | PRONI catalogue reference number: D3027/8/C/3/11. |
URL | http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/17309/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 243k |
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Wesley Hutchinson, « Ulster Scots – You’ve been framed! », Études irlandaises, 48-2 | 2023, 23-40.
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Wesley Hutchinson, « Ulster Scots – You’ve been framed! », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 48-2 | 2023, mis en ligne le 06 novembre 2023, consulté le 12 novembre 2024. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/etudesirlandaises/17309 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.17309
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