Rite and Reason:Understanding our past is the only sure way to understand the present, said Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley at the Boyne last Friday. Patsy McGarrywrites on how little the majority on this island know about the North's Protestant majority, its Presbyterians
The remarkable events of last week at Stormont and at the Battle of the Boyne site suggest that we could be on the cusp of something extraordinary in Irish history. It might be the start of a beautiful friendship between the peoples of this island.
We may be of the same stock, as Dr Ian Paisley has said, but we need to know, understand and, hopefully, like one another more.
For our part here in the Republic, we need to learn about the history of Northern Ireland's Presbyterians - those approximately 300,000 people (there are 23,500 in the Republic) who are the majority Protestant population in the North and who, many would contend, are the very backbone of the Ulster character. They are a remarkable people.
For instance, a lot has been written about the Catholic Irish in the US and their influence, but the Scots-Irish actually helped to create America.
It is estimated that 30 million Americans are of Scots-Irish descent. The 250,000 Ulster Presbyterians who started leaving for America in large numbers from 1717 played a vital part in the American War of Independence.
The Irish Catholic immigrants, however, only began to arrive in large numbers in the US in the 1840s, most of them fleeing the Famine. By then America had been formed.
As Belfast journalist and historian Billy Kennedy wrote in an Irishman's Diary for this newspaper in 1998: "The Ulster-Scots Presbyterians who settled in such large numbers on the American frontier 200 to 250 years ago were an independent breed, with a steely determination to overcome the considerable obstacles they faced in their New World wilderness.
"As non-conformist Calvinists who had suffered decades of religious and economic persecution, they were imbued with a desire never again to have to obey the undemocratic, and at times despotic, diktats of monarchs and prelates."
These people, many of whom left Ireland in reaction to the Penal Laws that persecuted them every bit as vigorously as they did Catholics, bequeathed to America their statutes separating church and state; recognition of religious difference; and ultimately freedom of speech.
Their ancestors had been Scots and English lowlanders who, even before coming to Ireland, were noted for fierce loyalty and a fighting spirit.
Both traits have been traced to a system of kinship developed under the lairds in lowland Scotland, where the kirk (congregation) rejected the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and replaced it with bottom-up elected councils.
This individualism and ability to reject authority helped to shape modern America's populist-style democracy. It is still clearly evident at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast every June, when democracy is exercised with a purity that is always as welcome as it is consistent.
After abandoning a life in the north of Ireland, where they were expected to act as a bulwark for their Anglican rulers against the Catholic Irish, they then refused to bend the knee to the New York and Boston elites descended from the same Anglican origins.
They pushed the American frontier westward from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky to Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and California.
They fought fiercely for the Confederate side in the civil war, but many Scots-Irish also supported the anti-slavery movement.
When the 13th amendment to the US constitution abolished slavery in 1865, it was signed by president Andrew Johnson, whose people came from Carrickfergus in Co Antrim.
Another Scots-Irish descendant, Andrew Jackson, was founder of the Democratic Party.
No fewer than 17 US presidents were of Scots-Irish descent. They included Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Alan Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George Bush snr, Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush.
You might also add Ronald Reagan. His Catholic grandfather was from Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary, but his mother was of Scots-Irish stock, and it was from her that he took his religion.
Other legendary American figures of Scots-Irish descent included Davy Crockett, Sam Houston and balladeer Stephen Foster.
Bluegrass music was one of their gifts to America and to the world, while the US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, was written by Scots-Irish descendant Francis Scott Key.
General "Stonewall" Jackson, General George S. Patton as well as authors Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Edgar Allan Poe and film star Jimmy Stewart were all of Scots-Irish descent, as was publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Indeed it is paradoxical that the Scots-Irish, who were largely responsible for the removal of British influence in America through their involvement in the War of Independence there from 1776 to 1782, are the same people who in Northern Ireland have striven so tenaciously to maintain the union with Britain.
They are, as the poet W.B. Yeats said of his own Anglican Church of Ireland ancestors, "no petty people".
We should be taught about them in our schools, as they should be taught about us in theirs.
Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent atThe Irish Times