Editorial: JD Vance is a reminder of the historic Ulster influence in the United States

​It is hard to say exactly how many of the 45 men who have been American president are of Scots Irish descent.

​If you define that as meaning having had one such descendant at some point, then probably more than half of them, because the recent US presidents have typically had many, many American forebears after centuries in the country. But even if you define it more narrowly, as meaning a sitting president having had a recent ancestor from Ulster, then it is at least a dozen. Andrew Jackson was born within a year or two of his parents sailing from Carrick.

There is no doubt that people with Ulster links have had an influence on the Oval Office disproportionate to our current tiny population. Senator JD Vance might be the next person to have such influence, albeit indirectly if he becomes the vice-president to Donald Trump as commander-in-chief.

Mr Vance has written about the Scots Irish – people of Ulster descent – in Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of a difficult upbringing in Kentucky, which has many historic links to what is now Northern Ireland (the Republican Party senate leader, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, has a Banbridge connection). Mr Vance’s book touches on problems such as joblessness, broken families, welfare and drugs which are also difficulties in NI loyalist areas. It might partly be due to Protestant individualism.

In any event, Mr Vance has since converted to Catholicism. Many of the most influential figures in Trump’s America are Catholic Irish, as the old American divisions between Catholic and Protestant dissolve (Scots Irish was once used as a way of hinting that a person was not Catholic Irish).

The Scots Irish are huge in number but do not have the influence of the Catholic Irish because they were more likely than the latter to lose any identity of origin and just call themselves American.

Neither Senator Vance nor indeed the Scottish American Mr Trump himself have shown much interest in Northern Ireland. Even so, the Scots Irish are a community that unionists could tap into.​