The fascinating story of the Scots Irish is told on stage in US

A week-long visit by the Ulster-Scots Agency to the United States has coincided with the world premiere of a new play on the arrival of the Scots Irish in America.

The play, ‘The Land of Promise’, opened at the Sheen Centre in New York on Tuesday.

It was staged by the agency in association with the Northern Ireland Bureau and the Origin Theatre Company.

It is intriguing that the performance is part of the Carnegie Festival of Migration. Andrew Carnegie, born 200 years ago in Scotland, is the ultimate migration story: he moved to America and became one of the richest men in the world.

Not only that, but he dedicated himself to divesting himself of that fortune, hence why to this day there are Carnegie libraries in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

The story of the Scots Irish is perhaps better known in America, where the Scots Irish identity is still a widely understood one, than it is here in Northern Ireland, yet it is from the north of Ireland that they set sail.

In fact our serialisation of early News Letters from 280 years ago recently included an ad for a 1739 sailing from Belfast to the then American colonies, only 20 years after the first wave of sailings from Ulster.

We have also recently reproduced reports from that time of the resentment that thriving American colonist traders felt at being disadvantaged in comparison to the French and Spaniards. Within 35 years that resentment would turn on Britain and lead to independence.

The cultural links between Ulster and north America could be much stronger than they are. Look how Dublin cultivates links with Irish America and beyond. Yet President Donald Trump and the powerful senator Mitch McConnell are among those who have Scottish or Scots Irish ancestry.

The Ulster-Scots Agency and Northern Ireland Bureau are to be congratulated on this venture — we hope the first of many.