One of America's biggest root problems: Scots-Irish culture

[Spider Jerusalem]

43. "Scots-Irish" != "Irish-American".

The Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, are the descendants of people from the Scottish borders region in the Scottish Lowlands and the north of England, many of whom went to Ireland in James I's "Plantation of Ulster" and who came to the American colonies in large numbers from around 1750 or so. They were mostly Presbyterian, and their descendants are likely to be Baptist, or Pentecostal. Most of these people settled in the Southern colonies, mostly in the so-called "back country". The yahoo with the Confederate flag sticker on his pickup that says "Heritage, Not Hate"? He's probably Scots-Irish (and a distant cousin to the yahoos in Northern Ireland who go marching through Catholic neighbourhoods with effigies of King Billy on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne).

"Irish-Americans" are mostly the descendants of Irish Catholics who left Ireland during the famine or not long after. Very few of them settled the South. There were sizeable numbers in some places in the South; New Orleans, because it was a port city, and Louisville because Kentucky has historically had a large Catholic population, but mostly the Irish who came to America settled in the North.

(And it's spelt "bollocks".)