Lee Reynolds, Northern Ireland’s new Ulster Scots commissioner, is a thoughtful and intelligent man. Yet even he is wrestling with the fundamental contradiction of his office: the Ulster Scots language does not exist.
A dialect of Scots does exist in parts of Ulster, or at least it did. Scots is often considered a dialect of English. There is truth in the old joke that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, but Ulster Scots does not have an army and a navy. It has public funding and public bodies, of which the commissioner is the latest example. His role is part of a complicated compromise to create an Irish Language Commissioner, agreed under the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal to restore devolution, although only now being set up.
In an intriguing interview with the Belfast Telegraph on Monday, Reynolds declared Ulster Scots to be a language whose revival and promotion would be at the heart of his work. While it might be assumed he has to say this, Reynolds has been given unique scope to expand his work beyond language. He has previously acknowledged that he and the Irish Language Commissioner, Pól Deeds, do not have “mirror image” roles.
Reynolds’s full job title is the Commissioner for the Ulster Scots and the Ulster British Tradition. Legislation specifies his remit as language, arts and literature.
READ MORE
Does the Ulster Scots in the title refer to a people or a tradition? If the latter, it is part of the Ulster British tradition. The novel term “Ulster British” remains undefined. It presumably encompasses the English ancestry of the Protestant population.
There is no doubt as to why this tortuous job description was formulated, even if nobody has been gauche enough to spell it out. Ulster Scots is not a counterpart to Irish, so balance requires a broader remit.
Reynolds must be fully aware of this. He was the DUP’s director of policy during the New Decade, New Approach negotiations, then special adviser to DUP leader Arlene Foster when further details of the language deal were pinned down.
That does not mean he fully agrees with the outcome. The DUP belatedly tried to tweak the job title to Commissioner for the Ulster Scots and Ulster British Traditions, which would have partitioned Scottish and English heritage.
Various human rights, equality and language groups have objected to commissioner’s expansive role. They complain it conflates Ulster Scots with unionism and sits oddly with international standards on the treatment of minority languages.
A traditional Ulster British response would be to tell these people to wise up. Of course Ulster Scots is a unionist issue and of course its asymmetry with Irish must be balanced to reflect the reality and practice of politics in Northern Ireland.
If there is any concern here, it is for unionism itself. Tying Britishness to a single-community cultural and ethnic project hampers any attempt to sell the union as a larger political idea. That complaint might require wising up as well.
There is a great deal of cynicism about Ulster Scots among unionists. Many consider it a desperately contrived counterweight to Irish, although where nationalists find this amusing or insulting, unionists might find it frustrating that their elected representatives did not concoct a better trade-off for political deals.
From this perspective, Reynolds should use his extra scope to nudge the language from the centre of his work to a quiet corner, until its nonexistence ceases to matter. Ulster British language, arts and literature should take its place, creating a de facto unionist cultural commissioner. Enough Ulster Scots culture does exist for worthy inclusion, thanks to Scottish influence and plantation history. One of the few successes of the Ulster Scots project has been the historical documentaries made (in English) by its dedicated broadcasting fund.
Reynolds gave some hints in his interview of looking in this direction. However, his most specific proposal was in the opposite direction: embedding Ulster Scots in schools by creating GCSE and A-level qualifications.
The New Decade, New Approach language legislation established a duty on Stormont to “encourage and facilitate the use and understanding of Ulster Scots in the education system.”
It seems Reynolds has been drawn towards this, although he could safely keep his distance: the duty falls to the education minister, currently the DUP’s Paul Givan.
Givan has never mentioned creating Ulster Scots qualifications – and no wonder, as they would be completely unviable. Only 282 people took Irish A-level in Northern Ireland last year, despite a growing Irish medium sector and the subject’s prevalence across the Catholic half of the school system. Also, the Irish language exists.
There will be no sympathy for anyone suggesting to pupils in the other half of the system, or to their parents, that they study Ulster Scots. The response to that would be in Anglo-Saxon.
