Northern Ireland and the Special Relationship
As we contemplate the US Presidential election tomorrow, it is worth pausing to reflect for a moment on the important contribution made by Northern Ireland to the Special Relationship.
In this we are assisted by a very important anniversary that Northern Ireland marks today, the eightieth anniversary of the death of one of her most consequential sons, Field Marshal Sir John Dill.
Born in Lurgan in 1881 and educated in Belfast, Dill was appointed General Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff in the midst of Dunkirk on 27 May 1940 and then moved by Churchill to the United States at the end of 1941 when America entered the war.
Dill spent the rest of the war, until his untimely death from cancer on 4th November 1944, leading military co-ordination between the UK and the USA.
He made such an impression on the Americans that his death was the occasion of the passing of resolutions by both Houses of Congress and the construction of a large and imposing statue of Dill on horseback at the Arlington National cemetery near Washington DC where he is buried.
When thinking about the relationship between the island of Ireland and the USA there is often a tendency for people to think of it entirely in terms of the connection between Irish-Americans and Irish nationalism. This, however, is a very partial picture. The United States also embraces the ‘Scotch-Irish’, described in the UK as the Ulster Scots, whose roots pertain to Northern Ireland and Scotland and are associated with a commitment to Northern Ireland being in union with Scotland and the rest of the UK.
Northern Ireland has had an extraordinary impact on the United States, with the Ulster Scots Agency identifying 20 Presidents with some Ulster Scots ancestry. Of these arguably the most significant was Andrew Jackson, whose point of connection to Northern Ireland is also the closest because, had he been born two years earlier, he would have been born in Carrickfergus (County Antrim, Northern Ireland) where his parents then lived and would thereby have been disqualified from the Presidency!
What makes Jackson particularly important at this time, though, is that he is widely recognised as the hero of Donald Trump. There are certainly some striking parallels. Jackson was perceived to be an outsider who took on the establishment, championed universal suffrage and won.
When Trump was elected President in 2016 an American academic, Walter Russell Mead suddenly found there was huge interest in a book he had written in 1999 about the place of the Jacksonian political tradition in America because the arrival of Trump validated so very clearly the influential presence of the aspect of American politics he had identified. Of huge consequence for Northern Ireland, in unpacking this tradition Mead did not just talk about Jackson, but the culture that shaped him, the Ulster Scots tradition of Northern Ireland and Scotland.
This is important for Northern Ireland regardless of who wins tomorrow, because even if it isn’t Trump, Jacksonian America is huge and affords Northern Ireland, and thus the wider UK, a real point of connection with the United States going forward. And if Trump does win, this time the interest of the Whitehouse should span both the President and the Vice President, JD Vance, who openly describes himself as Scotch-Irish and comes from the same part of America as Jackson, the Ulster Scots settlements around the Appalachians.
Returning to today’s anniversary it is important to remember that when Dill went to the USA, American troops came to Northern Ireland, the first part of the UK to receive them. Between 1942 and 1944 a staggering 300,000 American military personnel came to Northern Ireland, such that in some places, US troops accounted by 10% of the population! In this it is notable that in 1956 the academic John Williams Blake wrote that this was ‘singularly appropriate. Surely among the Americans now with them there were those who were coming back to the land of their forefathers. Ulster, they recalled, had once been a stage in the westward emigration: during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of the Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in Ulster had, after a hard apprenticeship here, moved on to colonise the New World. Now it was the destiny of Ulster, though this time under war conditions and in an eastward movement, once again to fulfil this intermediate role.’
Given all the points of connection, it is not at all surprising that the Americans got on so well with Dill.
Whatever happens tomorrow, Northern Ireland would greatly benefit from a peacetime Dill to represent us and the wider UK in the United States going forward.
Dr Dan Boucher was a TUV/Reform candidate for Belfast South and Mid Down July 2024, and former member of the Conservative Party for whom he has previously stood in UK, Welsh and European Parliamentary elections. He has a PhD in sovereignty and International Relations.
