Donald Trump’s choice for Republican vice-presidential running mate has previously described his pride in being descended from Ulster Scots who moved to America from the north of Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries.
J.D Vance, a senator from Ohio who was named as Mr Trump’s campaign partner on Monday, wrote of his family’s roots in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
In the book, the 39-year-old spoke of his early life in Ohio, where his grandparents moved from the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky “in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them”.
The Appalachian region is where many Ulster Scots settled in the U.S, a generation after the Ulster plantation.
In the U.S, those of Ulster Scots descent are more commonly known as ‘Scots-Irish’, or often ‘Scotch-Irish’.
In 2017, around 3 million people in the U.S described themselves specifically as having Scots-Irish heritage.
In his book, Mr Vance - a former arch-critic of Donald Trump - described himself as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart”.
“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) of the Northeast,” he wrote in the memoir, which was adapted as a film in 2020 by director Ron Howard: “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition - their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”
He described the Scots-Irish as “one of the most distinctive subgroups in America”.
“This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits - an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country - but also many bad ones,” he said.
“We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”
The term “hillbilly”, often used as a derogatory term to describe rural people in the Appalachian region and elsewhere in America, is sometimes claimed to have emerged due to the Ulster-Scots links to ‘King Billy’ - William of Orange - but this has been disputed by scholars, who say the term only emerged towards the end of the 19th century in America.
