Editorial: This newspaper has been reporting on America for almost 300 years, and is one of the few surviving titles to have covered the Declaration of Independence

​Joe Kennedy III, the US economic envoy to Northern Ireland, paid tribute yesterday to the “rugged, determined men and women” who left Ulster for America.​

Mr Kennedy had already said similar things over the events to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, and he said it first here on these pages in his first written essay in the Northern Ireland media. He is talking about the same folk to whom President Joe Biden referred on his visit to Belfast last week, what the Americans tend to call the Scots Irish, what we call the Ulster Scots (the latter a phrase which, diplomatically, Mr Biden used in an address which was more respectful of unionism than was his predecessor’s President Bill Clinton’s on Wednesday). Mr Kennedy was viewing a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence, on display in Belfast yesterday. There are around 20 originals left.

This newspaper has been publishing since almost the earliest waves of migration from Ulster to the New World. While an unsuccessful attempt to sail to America was made by the Eagle’s Wing in 1636, almost exactly a century before the Belfast News Letter was founded, there were few crossings prior to the early 1700s. The first surviving News Letters from 1738 have ads for two boats to America heading out west in the summer of 1739. By the 1750s boats were heading to America almost monthly in summer.

So we have been reporting on America since before it became independent, and ever since. There was even a charming myth that we were first in Europe to report the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (something we made clear in our 275th anniversary was not true). But while we were not the first, we are one of the only papers that reported that seismic event and is still publishing daily. Now we are now covering closely the latest chapter in Ulster-US relations.