Editorial: ​Marco Rubio comments show there are opportunities for Northern Ireland leaders to connect with political thinking in Washington

Mr Rubio, who is US secretary of state (in effect, President Donald Trump’s foreign minister) made these striking comments:

“Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.”

There was no mention of the later wave of immigration from Ireland that followed the famine of the 1840s. That Irish influx was large, but the Scots-Irish arrivals were a century earlier. The first surviving Belfast News Letter from 1738 has an advertisement for a ship leaving for America the coming spring.

Scots-Irish was once a way of saying Protestant Irish in America. Typically people who had come to Ulster from Scotland in the early 1600s and moved on to north America a century or two later – the people who make up the unionist community today.

Mr Rubio, as highest-ranking member of the US cabinet, is one of the most senior politicians in America. The second most senior, Vice-President JD Vance, considers himself Scots-Irish. President Trump is German and Scottish. Yet Mr Rubio’s remark was barely reported outside this newspaper.

Last year, NI’s deputy first minister Emma Little-Pengelly and other unionists struck up a rapport for Mr Trump around St Patrick’s Day. Sinn Fein stayed away, in protest at Gaza. It is not clear if the president was even aware of their snub.

With great admiration of the UK in Washington DC, and a lesser but nonetheless real awareness of Northern Ireland, there is an opportunity for leaders from the province to connect with much of the current political thinking in the US capital.