Reply to If you're of Irish Protestant ancestry, do you consider yourself Irish American?

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm surprised that so many seem to think that there were only 2 ethnic groups in Ireland: Catholic and Ulster Scots.

You're missing the Protestant Ascendancy--the rich folks who were members of the Church of Ireland--Church of England before Irish independence. They looked down at the Presbyterian Scots almost as much as they looked down on the Irish.

Even more surprisingly to us now, one of the most famous rebellions in Irish history occurred in 1798 when Scots Irish, fed up with the way the Ascendancy folks treated them attempted to unite with Irish Catholics to overthrown the Ascendency. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1798
 
There are 2 kinds of Scots Irish. One group really is Scottish or Northern English. They come largely from the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster They were brought to Ireland to dilute the power of the Irish clans.

The other group wasn't really Scottish at all. When the US imposed ethnic quotas on immigration, the Irish quota was quickly used up. So Scots Irish--the genuine article--would list their ethnicity as Scottish rather than Irish because it made it easier to get into the US. Other Irish Protestants saw this and they too started calling themselves Scots to get into the US. That was fine with many American immigration officials because the ethnic quotas had been introduced in large part to limit the number of "Papist" immigrants.

Even in Ireland itself, Protestants started spelling their names differently to signal they weren't Catholic. So you have names like Kelly/Kelley, Daily/Dailey, etc. with the added E signaling the family was Protestant.

One thing that's interesting is that the different DNA testing companies define these ethnic groups differently. The breakdown among those with "Irish" ancestry among the 3 groups is handled differently by the different companies. [/quote]

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