During the period between the First and Second World Wars, the responsibilities of leadership, at one of the most critical points in Ulster’s history, were shouldered by Lord Craigavon. But with the outbreak of war again and declining health, he was unable to continue . He died peacefully on Sunday November 24th, 1940, then in his seventieth year. His biographer St John Ervine has written of him “I have only to add that the liking I have felt for Lord Craigavon, a liking which was aroused entirely by his genial and friendly disposition has grown with the greater intimacy which writing his life has brought me. The testimony to his extraordinary likeability is, I find, almost universal. The love felt for him in his home, was felt by his friends. His political opponents, however much they differed from him, no matter how much he sometimes incensed them, admired and liked him.
No political passion could disturb the great regard he felt for the two nationalists, both Ulstermen, whom he most frequently encountered, Joseph Devlin and Jeremiah McVeagh; and their regard for him was no less than his for them. Death has not reduced his stature, nor in any degree diminished him; he has been raised and increased. We Ulster people hold him in particular pride. He was our man, blood of our blood, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. Ulster sets its seal upon him, and he set his seal on Ulster. In accent and mind and manner, in body and belief, James Craig, born and bred and buried in the County of Down was unmistakably marked by his people and his country. He was an Ulsterman.”
St John Ervine goes on:” No one, looking at Craig could fail to see that he was an Ulsterman and anyone, if he were discerning enough, might recognise him for a County Down man. We do not know how long the family has lived in the Ards, but we can prove their residence since the early eighteenth century, and have ample cause to believe that they were domiciled in Down or Antrim much earlier: on the land for the most part, and afterwards businessmen and professional men, with an occasional soldier or sailor; but always with the soil of Ulster round their roots. They belonged to what ”native” Irish authors plaintively call Planted people, a charge that they would have denied on grounds at least as sound as those on which it is preferred. But even if the charge were true, and men do not become native to a country which they have inhabited for several centuries, how many centuries must elapse before any American who is not an Amerindian will cease to be an alien? Or is a man’s nationality fixed by his political opinions?
The charge, however, is denied. The Ulster Scot, as his description implies, was originally a Northern Irishman who went to Scotland to civilise it and make it Christian. When the Craigs and their kind returned to Ireland, they came, not as aliens, but as exiles returning to their father’s home. Ulstermen of Antrim and Down, the little kingdom of Ulidia, deny that they are Scots in the sense that they are indigenous to the soil of Scotland and interlopers in Ireland; they are, they claim, the original Scots, the Northern Irishmen who crossed the North Channel to Iona and the Lowlands, and then, having civilised the “Scots”, returned to their own country to recivilise it, after it had fallen into the unthrifty guard of the “native” Irish.
There has been continued and intimate traffic between north–east Ulster and Scotland throughout recorded Irish history. There are only eleven miles of water between Fairhead in Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, which is so close to the whole coast of the county that on clear days Scots can be seen working in their fields. The distance between Donaghadee in Down to Port Patrick in Wigtownshire is twenty-two miles. The relations between Antrim, Down and Scotland have been inextricably mingled, and it is impossible to say of any Ulster Scot of longer establishment than two centuries in Ireland whether he belongs to a family which has inhabited Ireland for hundreds of years or has passed backwards and forwards between the two countries for the same period. The northern part of Antrim and the whole of Argyll were once part of the kingdom of Dal Riada. Of such were the Craigs; rocklike men; and it is their closeness to the earth of Ulster, a closeness which remained after centuries of absence from it, which denotes the strong Ulidian quality in the Craigs,and, like all Craigs, most truly.”
Thus the Ulster Scot narrative of Craigavon was broader than that promulgated by elements within contemporary Northern Ireland such as the Ulster-Scots Community Network, formerly the Ulster-Scots Heritage Council, founded by Nelson McCausland, the present Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Stormont, which refers in its publications to “four centuries of Ulster-Scots connections” beginning with the settlement in Ulster of lowland Scots in the early seventeenth century. But there is a still broader narrative, since I would posit that the Ulster Scots are descendents of the original inhabitants of both Great Britain and Ireland, the Cruthini populi, the people of the Cruthin. The Belgic Dal Riada were dynastic overlords of those ancient British people known as Pretani to the Greeks, Cruthin to the Gaels and Picts to the Romans. This is the narrative, closer perhaps to the thinking of Edward Carson, which I hope will be bequeathed to posterity.
Concluded