Lewiston Maine mass shooting: Northern Ireland shares grief after gunman kills 16 - Baroness Hoey's sister one of thousands under lockdown

Judith Owens, CEO of Titanic Belfast, offered the American business delegation currently visiting NI her condolences at an event yesterday morning. Senator George Mitchell - the US diplomat at the centre of the Good Friday Agreement - is also from Maine.

Baroness Hoey said her sister Elizabeth who lives near Augusta in Maine was subjected to a lockdown on Thursday."Yes, she's about 20 miles from where the awful shooting was," Baroness Hoey said on Thursday afternoon. "I've just been speaking to her and even though they're 20 miles away, because they haven't got the suspect yet, everybody's been told to stay indoors."Maine is seen as one of those quite wonderful winter resort type places, full of forests and such a quiet peaceful place," she added. "So I think the shock from these shootings will be huge, because in the past such shootings have more often taken place in urban areas in more southern areas."Dr. David Hume, broadcaster and Ulster Scots historian, told the News Letter the news was "extremely disturbing" and that it was "a terrible loss of life"."Maine is an area where lots of families do have connections with Northern Ireland, going back to the early migrations of the 18th century," he said. "So our thoughts would be with everyone affected by this tragedy and particularly from the Ulster Scots community point of view.“There have been a number of projects in Maine to highlight the connections with Northern Ireland, with the state having its very own Belfast and Bangor.”Anthropology Professor Barry H. Rodrigue, who is from Lewiston and describes himself as Scots-Irish, told the News Letter it is "a tremendous sadness I share with the victims and their families in Lewiston and Maine".

While at the University of Southern Maine, he started the Scots-Irish Archaeology Survey with colleagues which excavated an 18th century Scots-Irish site in Bowdoinham. He told the News Letter that the shootings are "a national tragedy" linked to defunding of the US education and health care systems since the 1980s.Michelle Connolly is CEO of Belfast animation studio Educational Voice, which developed animated videos on the history of the Ulster Scots. She offered “our deepest sympathies to all those affected by the recent tragedy”.She added that former Ulster Scots Agency officer Richard Hanna had been "instrumental in supporting our Ulster-Scots programme and in strengthening connections between Maine and the Ulster-Scots".In 2018 a conference was held at Bowdoin College in Maine by the Northern Ireland Ulster-Scots Agency and the Maine Ulster-Scots Project. As result, contributions from 19 authors were collated into the book ‘1718 – 2018’ Reflections on 300 years of the Scots-Irish in Maine’.News Letter journalist Billy Kennedy, who has written 17 books on the Ulster Scots, says that 17 Presidents of America have had family connections to Ulster.