The Ulster-Scots link makes Burns Night special in NI

Robert Burns is, as the historian Gordon Lucy explains in today’s newspaper, celebrated worldwide.

But outside of Scotland itself, where Burns is regarded as the national poet, there is perhaps nowhere that marks Burns Night more readily than this Province.

He was born in 1759 just across the water in Ayrshire, the son of a Scottish tenant farmer. Burns lived through an extraordinary time in human history, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and political upheaval. It is an era that is comprehensively chronicled in the Belfast News Letter that had been founded 22 years before his birth and was crammed with Scottish news from its earliest editions.

The 1700s was Scotland’s Golden Age, its enlightenment shaped by great thinkers among whom the Ulster-born philosopher the Rev Francis Hutcheson was one of the earliest and most influential.

Burns often wrote in the Scottish dialect, but his insights were such that his influence on English literature is profound. Some famous quotes are from Burns poems such as:

‘Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn’

And:

‘The best laid schemes o’ mice and men

Gang aft a-gley’ (translated as ‘often go awry’)

The Northern Irish have a complex identity, shaped by all-island influences, but also heavily by Great Britain, particularly Scotland, which after all is closer to Co Antrim than is most of the Republic. Burns Night celebrates that influence.

It is 257 years since the poet’s birth, and the Scotland that reveres him is closer than it has ever been in that time to separation from the Union. But this is a date when we mark some of the heritage we have in common.