Talk:Irish Americans/Archive 6

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Who Keeps Deleting Half the Pictures?

Who keeps deleting all the pictures? I fixed and added many of them, however. USER: USA23 (talk)USA23USA23 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:25, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

How Scotch-Irish identify

I'm not going to get into an edit war over this, but I think that the recent contributions I have made here should stay, so I'm reverting them back. If anyone disagrees, then we can talk this out here and come to some sort of understanding. The books I've given on the Scots-Irish do state that most identify as Irish or American. Whether more identify as American than Irish is beside the point, because more identify as Irish rather than Scotch-Irish. Look at the demographics of Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky---all areas with heavy Scots- Irish settlement, yet there are much more self-identified Irish in these areas than Scotch Irish. Kinfoll77 (talk) 20:09, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a better compromise on interpretation of the sources would be to make a distinction between how the descendants of the Scotch-Irish self-identify their "ethnicity", and what they claim as their "ancestry". It has been noted for a long time (see "The Southern Highlander and His Homeland" from the early 20th century) that many of the settlers in the southern uplands simply do not known where their ancestors came from 300 years ago. Many have surnames that could be English, Irish, Scottish, etc., and many of these people also have German or French Huguenot roots. Checking the "ancestry" block in the census or a survey is often just a guess. Ask any of them what they identify as (as opposed to what they claim their ancestry to be) and they will mainly say "American". As the Langan article says, “For Protestants, however, being Irish is a link back to ‘Scotch-Irish’ roots that go back to the 1700′s [sic]. It is an ethnicity associated with individualism, evangelicalism, and determination. 'Claiming an Irish identity today is a way for Protestant Americans to associate themselves with the values of the American Revolution, or, if you will, is a way of using ethnicity to be American,' Carroll concluded.” Eastcote (talk) 11:53, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Updating the numbers

At this point (2014) it seems worthwhile to update the reported numbers of Irish Americans nationwide. The newest available figures from the Census are the American Community Survey numbers from 2013. These numbers have a margin of error of 127,000, meaning the drop of over 1 million from the 2010 census to 2013 is statistically valid. The methodology (self-reporting) is the same between 2010 and 2013, the only difference is the sample size. I can't think of a reason to preserve the 2010 figures in the infobox; can anyone enlighten me? --Ken Gallager (talk) 16:00, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

How on Earth has the Irish American population declined by 1,000,000 in 4 years? Just out of curiosity. Definately more than one in ten Americans is Irish, and almost all references say that the Irish American population is give or take within the 35,000,000-40,000,000 range. --Chicago1997 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 17:53, 18 December 2014

Scotch-Irish, a slippery subject

Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish, but a slippery subject whatever you call it. As an Irish-American, whose father came here from Scotland, I can tell you I do not identify at all with these people, these "Scotch Irish." They don't belong to us. They are a people disowned by England (which was Elizabeth's point in chasing them off the island and tagging them with a new name - the Scotch-Irish - completing the separation from their homeland and the cultural/psychological work of disowning them). No longer English (or Irish, Pictish, Scottish, Cornish or Welsh), herded into Ulster to hold it for the Royals against the native Irish, despised on both islands, the Scotch-Irish are neither Irish nor Scottish, not by blood; they are a vat of all the unwanted grapes of Britain shipped to Ireland for a sordid purpose and thence to Appalachia, Missouri and Oklahoma. In America, they're embraced in the history books and the radio stations and whenever there's a war to fight. But drive through Oklahoma, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, anywhere the Scotch-Irish are, and tell me if you see signs of a love affair with these people. Well.... there's a sort of one, it turns out, and in a lot of places you can hear it more than see it. And like a lot of love affairs, or maybe like all of them, this one is really complicated. And interesting! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.213.10.40 (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

(Ten) Stages of Irish-American History

I came up with the 10 stages of what it meant to be Irish in America, from a despised underclass compared to Blacks, Jews and other racial, ethnic, religious or sectarian groups in American society, to one group who has blended in, succeeded, socially accepted and are respected, esp after the presidential election and assassination of John F Kennedy (his term 1961-63). In the 2010s/21st century/new millennia, Americans value diversity and tolerance of all people, but it wasn't always been this way.

  • 1765-90: The Irish became viewed as heroic for their patriotism, the Irish objected to being ruled by the King of England, and Anglo-Americans started to reject inherited anti-Irish sentiment, official freedom of religion granted to Catholics.
  • 1790-1815: Irish Protestants further integrated or assimilated into the Anglo-American majority, but Irish Catholics were a diaspora with a strong ethnic identity, which increased for the next century, even is strong all the way to the 1960s.
  • 1815-40: Irish Catholics began to adopt "Scotch-Irish", which meant they were Protestant or Scottish descent (they were Ulster Scots in the USA), but this is due to anti-Irish sentiment and anti-Catholicism in 19th century American life.
  • 1840-65: Generally hated, disliked and discriminated by the Anglo-American majority, in part due to high Irish immigration fleeing the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. "NINA" or "No Irish Need Apply" signs were common in employment practices.
  • 1865-90: The Irish minority after the "uniting" Civil war, known to participate as "Whites" in anti-Black racist violence, ironically, the Irish lived in close proximity to Blacks in early America, even the Anglos called them "Lighter Negroes".
  • 1890-1915: Irish-American participation in politics, as the most involved ethnic group minority, and not surprisingly, the majority were Democrat or progressive, when many Irish were lower-income, blue-collar and not widely integrated in society.
  • 1915-40: Anglo-American society divided on whether the Irish are loyal or not to the country (Irish opposition to the US alliance with the UK during WW1, when Ireland was in rebellion and in 1919, Ireland declared independence from Britain).
  • 1940-65: The Irish were widely accepted, esp. after the Great Depression (1930s) and World War II (1941-45), they became virtually "White" and that generation was much more Americanized, plus lower prejudice and less ethnic discrimination.
  • 1965-90: More interest and vocal opinions of being "ethnic", yet Anglo-Americans stereotyped working-class Irish as racists against African-Americans, when Blacks moved into formerly "ethnic" neighborhoods in Northern/East Coast major cities.
  • Current (1990-2015): Anglo-Americans view the Irish as ideal integrated Whites or assimilated Americans, more conservative Republican, an increase of Evangelical Protestants, and the tension over Northern Ireland subsided in the Irish community.
  • In 2016 going to 2017, the Irish are a commonality not a novelty among Americans, but looking back 250 years in the time line, the Irish struggled to become a more accepted and respected part of the country, esp. the Anglo-Protestant majority. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.49.89.214 (talk) 11:07, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

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Definitions of whiteness in the United States

There is no currently no text on the subject of Irish-Americans in the article - though the Irish were widely classed as "not white" during the 19th Century - and subject-matter experts are needed. Coretheapple (talk) 12:12, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

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Irish in the Civil War

"During the American Civil War, Irish Americans volunteered in high numbers for the Union Army, and at least 38 Union regiments had the word "Irish" in their title. 144,221 Union soldiers were born in Ireland; additionally, perhaps an equal number were of Irish descent.[38]"

In fact this number is an estimate for the number of Irish-born who served in the Union army volunteer units and doesn't include all the Irish in regular army units, militia units, the marines, and navy. Moreover, the source is wrong. The estimate is from a US Sanitary commission report since the US army didn't record the place of birth for at least 40 percent of the soldiers, as acknowledged in the Sanitary Commission report. The number of Irish-born was probably more like 180,000 to 200,000 -- Irish-born were awarded 148 Medals of Honor for Civil War valor a statistic which is highly correlated with enlistments and combat deaths, 1523 Medals of Honor in all were awarded during the Civil War to the estimated 2,300,000 who served in the Union army, navy and marines.

Of course, a great many soldiers and sailors serving the Union army and navy were the children of Irish immigrants, including (but not limited to):

  • General Phil Sheridan
  • General Gordon Meade, commander of the Union army at Gettysburg
  • General John Reynolds, Meade's second in command at Gettysburg
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, foster child
  • William Patrick Hogarty, Antietam Medal of Honor hero
  • Edward Patrick Doherty, led the cavalry regiment that hunted down John Wilkes Booth
  • Alfred Thayor Mahan, author of "Sea Power" and son of West Point leader Dennis Hart Mahan
  • Michael Healy, hero of Michener's "Alaska" and one of the first of African-American descent to be commissioned an officer by Lincoln — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.3.32.143 (talk) 17:58, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Question

-- Was Fernando Wood Irish? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.3.32.143 (talk) 18:18, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

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Stop the Sectarian Edits in the Religion Section

In the first sentence of the religion section, a sly attempt was made to switch the minority religious affiliation with the majority so that the article would promote the fake claim that Irish Americans are mostly Catholic. This claim was unsourced, it is untrue, and I would advise whoever did it not to do it again.

I switched it back so that it properly reads "Protestant majority with a Catholic minority." If called for I can cite this:

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-obama-s-offaly-roots-help-shatter-irish-american-myths-1.913550

this:

https://religionnews.com/2014/03/17/irish-americans-religion-politics/

or this:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rac.2006.16.1.25?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Jonathan f1 (talk) 10:23, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Bill Clinton's irish heritage

Bill Clintons irish heritage is verified: "President Clinton’s paternal grandmother was Lou Birchie Ayers (the daughter of Simpson Green “Dick” Ayers and Hattie Hayes). Lou was born in Mississippi. Simpson was the son of Asa Ayres, who was born in Ireland, and of Olivia/Olive Vessells. Hattie was possibly the daughter of William Andrew Hayes and Elizabeth Carolin." --Lord vom Ork (talk) 22:57, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Consensus Proposal

At least one of Jajhill's edits needs to be reverted, but it occurred in a paragraph that's already been heavily edited, so I am coming here to look for consensus. I would also like to reach an agreement that the restored information be protected, short of a compelling reason to have it removed.

The opening paragraph in the body of this article used to read this way,

"Half of the Irish immigrants in the Colonial Era came from the Irish province of Ulster while the other half came from the other three provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster and Connacht).[11] There is no way to determine how many of these early settlers were of native Irish ancestry or descend from the Ulster plantation. Historiographer Michael J. O'Brien examined many of the muster rolls from the Revolutionary War and found mostly quintessential native Irish surnames and possible Anglicized Irish surnames, he estimated that some 38% of those in the revolutionary army were Irish.[12] Most descendants of the Protestant Irish today identify their ancestry as simply "American" or "Irish,"[13][14] they were descendants of native Irish, Scottish, and English."

The information written of above is factual, even in tone, and it was sourced. On Dec 10, Jajhill strolled up and took out practically the entire paragraph, replacing it with an awkward revision that reads more like commentary on Northern Irish sectarian tensions than the opener to an encyclopedia article on Irish Americans,

"Half of the Irish immigrants in the colonial era came from the Irish province of Ulster while the other half came from the other three provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, and Connacht).[11] While scholarly estimates vary, the most common approximation is that 250,000 migrated to the United States between 1717 and 1775.[12] By 1790, approximately 400,000 people of Irish birth or ancestry lived in the United States,[11] and by 1800, they accounted for one-sixth of the population of the country.[13] These early immigrants were overwhelmingly members of the Protestant minority in Ireland who descended from Scottish and English colonists and colonial administrators who had settled the Plantations of Ireland, the largest of which was the Plantation of Ulster.[14] In Ireland, they are referred to as the Ulster Scots and the Anglo-Irish respectively (and as the Ulster Protestants collectively), but they almost never intermarried with the native Irish Catholic population,[15][16] who in turn almost never converted to Protestant churches during the Reformation.[17](For that matter, intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland has remained rare into the 21st century and remains highly stigmatized due to the Troubles and the dissident Irish Republican campaign that has followed them.)[18][19]"

Jajhill can't remove sourced information with a simple note that says "historically inaccurate". The information wasn't historically imprecise, and more importantly, the editor of the original paragraph, unlike Jajhill, didn't make a positive claim about the 'real' ethnic origins of early American settlers from Ireland in such a way as to restrict their ancestries to one or two particular groups. It is extremely difficult for the genealogist or scholar to come by evidence to conclude on these matters; prior to 1820, ship captains weren't required by law to submit passenger lists to authorities, so researchers who are looking to develop ethnic histories of early settlers often have to rely on proxies -- such as court records of naturalization and militia muster rolls -- and then use the surnames they find as rough indicators for ancestral origins (which is also problematic). What is significant about A Hidden Phase of American History (the original source for the original paragraph) is that the researcher actually pursued hundreds of newspaper articles, court records, and Revolutionary War rolls, and found a preponderance of traditional Irish names therein. This differs dramatically from the usual scholarly treatment of this subject, which fundamentally relies on previous written accounts. There is no serious justification for removing this material.

A Hidden Phase of American History was accompanied by hundreds of other articles of the same focus, published in The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society. Recent scholarship by Michael P. Carroll referenced this research and expanded on it in Chapter One of American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination,

https://books.google.com/books?id=PQh3pTgmRJ8C&pg=PA1975&lpg=PA1975&dq=american+catholics+in+the+protestant+imagination+how+the+irish+became+protestant+in+america&source=bl&ots=raVoSJfY3S&sig=kySMlr3YLBSAjtLtepQuqNLlqVg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjBgfncz5vfAhVi9YMKHZPiD-0Q6AEwB3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=american%20catholics%20in%20the%20protestant%20imagination%20how%20the%20irish%20became%20protestant%20in%20america&f=false

The largest of the many problems in Jajhill's edit is that most of his sources rely on testimony regarding sectarian restrictions on intermarriage in Northern Ireland and the fact that the Reformation never commanded a notable influence on the indigenous Irish population. I will remind everyone that this article is not on sectarian phenomena in Northern Ireland -- or anything about Northern Ireland, for that matter -- but on Irish Americans. Carroll doesn't claim that the Reformation took hold of Ireland, or that there was a phenomenon of indigenous Irish Protestants pouring into the colonies throughout the 18th Century. But he does argue that the sectarian divisions that would later define the sociopolitical climate of Ulster -- and the rest of Ireland until the 1922 partition -- were far less pronounced in the 18th Century, and that immigrants from Ireland in 18th Century America, Protestants and Catholics, had far more in common than not. He also states that scholars generally agree with the position that most 18th Century Irish Catholics converted to Protestantism once in the colonies, and that they would've expressed no reservations in doing so; there was no deliberate effort to link Irish nationalism to Catholicism until the 19th Century, he argues, so that most 18th Century Irish Catholics adhered to a superficial faith tradition that they weren't terribly wedded to. In other words, the better part of the argument I am supporting is related to the process of assimilation in colonial America, not obstacles to cultural cohesion in Ireland itself, regardless of how prominent or not these barriers may have been during the 1700s.

There seems to be agreement here that 18th Century immigration from Ireland was split between migrants from Ulster and those from the Southern provinces. There are nine counties that make up Ulster, three of which are now in the ROI. These three counties -- Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal -- were not significantly planted with Scottish and English settlers, and it is a reasonable likelihood that most migrants from these areas were natives. In other words, even among the Ulster half of the colonial migration waves, not all of them descended from Plantation Scots. We then have the other half that came out of Southern Ireland.

If you're experiencing doubts over the veracity of the claims made in A Hidden Phase of American History and How the Irish Became Protestant in America, you could always use your own eyes and see for yourself. Check the National Archives of Revolutionary War rolls,

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=4282

Type in random Irish surnames and see what records are returned. I've been doing this a while and thus far can't find any Irish names that aren't represented in the rolls. Typing in traditional Irish names like Cullen, Murphy, and Kelly not only return a great many records, but many of these records list the colony of Virginia next to the name. This is significant because Virginia banned Catholics from military service, so these soldiers were undoubtedly Protestants.

There are only three explanations for all of these Irish names in the colonial record. The first is that they were 'really' English and Scots who changed their names. This is of course preposterous, as they would've had no incentive to Gaelicize their names, and besides this, the opposing argument insists on strict cultural divisions in Ireland. The second possibility is that there was far more intermarriage than is otherwise claimed, and the third is that these soldiers were simply descendants of the native Irish. In all probability, it was likely a little of the second scenario and a lot of the third.

Now, I do not know if National Archives are a reliable source for Wikipedia, and more importantly, I am not insisting on the inclusion of original research. My purpose for bringing this up is to demonstrate the reliability of the original reference that supported the pre-edited paragraph, and to assert that Jajhill had no business removing it.

I would advise we revert Jajhill's edit, polish up the original paragraph and support it further with more reliable sources. The net effect of Jajhill's revision was the erasure of an entire class of early Irish colonial settlers, and there is no justifiable reason for presenting the information in this manner.Jonathan f1 (talk) 10:20, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Support I support the Jonathan f1 proposal. Rjensen (talk) 10:31, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
Oppose Most of the references cited were already included in the Irish Americans, Scotch-Irish Americans, Protestantism in Ireland, and History of the Catholic Church in the United States articles with direct quotations added. I cannot possibly see how or why anyone could possibly dispute General Social Survey data from the NORC at the University of Chicago in the Carroll quote, the data from the State Archives of North Carolina in the Blethen & Wood quote, much less the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups data. It may seem like a commentary on Northern Ireland, but the reality is that most of the Irish in that time period in the United States were not Catholic, as most people (English, Scots, Dutch, Germans, or African Americans) living in the Thirteen Colonies weren't.
"The net effect of Jajhill's revision was the erasure of an entire class of early Irish colonial settlers, and there is no justifiable reason for presenting the information in this manner." This is an unfair accusation. The section of the article still retains an image of Charles Carroll and notes that he was Catholic. It also notes that there was a population of Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania and provides statistics to indicate where the historic migration patterns occurred. It does nothing to remove the history of early Irish Catholic colonial settlers, just providing nuance to indicate where and how prevalent Irish Catholic migration to the United States was in the colonial period.
"The largest of the many problems in Jajhill's edit is that most of his sources rely on testimony regarding sectarian restrictions on intermarriage in Northern Ireland and the fact that the Reformation never commanded a notable influence on the indigenous Irish population." This is despicably dishonest. The section quotes historian Sean Duffy in The Concise History of Ireland, "...the Irish saw the Protestant Reformation as just an instrument of military conquest and forced Anglicisation... [because of this] the numbers of Roman Catholics remained high [during Queen Elizabeth's reign] and they were zealously ministered to by a plentiful supply of Continentally-trained priests, among whom the Jesuits were predominant: the latter were so successful in performing their task that by the end of Elizabeth's reign they had won the hearts-and-minds battle among the populace, as regards the choice between Catholicism and Protestantism... [By] 1603... it was too late and the Protestant Reformation had failed in Ireland." Also, despite the article citing multiple sources written about the pre-20th century history of Ulster that do not contain statistics, no alternative sources have been provided indicating that the "testimony" was false or a mischaracterization of historic intermarriage patterns in Ireland. However, the source in the article that does cite Irish census statistics from 1911 indicate that the historic patterns of intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland was in the early 20th century and the article section links to an article section about contemporary intermarriage in Northern Ireland indicating that intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland has remained rare into 21st century.
Nowhere in that section of the article does it say anything remotely like "scholars generally agree with the position that most 18th Century Irish Catholics converted to Protestantism once in the colonies, and that they would've expressed no reservations in doing so; there was no deliberate effort to link Irish nationalism to Catholicism until the 19th Century, he argues, so that most 18th Century Irish Catholics adhered to a superficial faith tradition that they weren't terribly wedded to" because none of the quotations in the references indicate that and seems oddly reminiscent of the Irish slaves myth. (As noted in the Duffy quotation, Irish Catholics generally did not convert to Protestantism while in Ireland during the Reformation. It seems strange that in Ireland, where Irish Catholics resisted forced conversions for centuries that once they came to the United States, they didn't resist conversion.)
Reread Carroll's article/book chapter, as per the previous editor's comments, and here is what Carroll actually states about Michael O'Brien's A Hidden Phase of American History: "O'Brien... searched through a wide range of documents—newspaper accounts of passenger ships from Irish ports disembarking in America; muster rolls; early accounts of settlement in Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere; and so on—in an effort to show that Irish Catholics had been more numerous in the colonial period than previously acknowledged... O'Brien's... argument is now generally rejected, mainly because much of the evidence he presented in support of a large Irish Catholic presence in the colonial period rests upon dubious assumptions linking particular surnames to a Catholic background." (Carroll 2006 p. 28)
"Does not verifiably mention or relate to the main topic." The topic of this article are people who self-identify as Irish Americans. Most people who self-identify as Irish Americans also self-identify as Protestant. "The information wasn't historically imprecise, and more importantly, the editor of the original paragraph, unlike Jajhill, didn't make a positive claim about the 'real' ethnic origins of early American settlers from Ireland in such a way as to restrict their ancestries to one or two particular groups." This is what the article said at one point: "There is no way to determine how many of these early settlers were of native Irish ancestry or descend from the Ulster plantation"; and "Most descendants of the Protestant Irish today identify their ancestry as simply "American" or "Irish",[12][13] they were descendants of Native Irish, Scottish and English... However religious numbers should be noted in context that at this period of time the Roman Catholic religion was proscribed and discouraged and that many Protestants are descendants of Catholics by logical definition." The first quotation added no information to the article and had no citation to verify its claim, and the latter was trivially true, historically imprecise, and misleading. The article makes no claim about the "'real' ethnic origins" (whatever that means) of people who claim Irish ancestry in the United States and also self-identify as Protestants.
What it does do is trace out where Protestants and Catholics settled in the United States (the latter almost exclusively in Maryland and Pennsylvania because of religious toleration laws), as well as historic interfaith and interethnic marriage patterns in both Ireland and the United States, and until and unless someone can provide positive evidence (besides anecdotes) that a statistically significant subset of Irish Americans who self-identify as Protestants descend from forced Irish Catholic converts in the colonial period did not just migrate to Maryland and Pennsylvania as per the sources (which as noted above, historiographers have historically attempted to do and failed), and/or that Protestants and Catholics did intermarry in Ireland and United States at a far greater degree than depicted in the article section's academic citations, I do not believe that the population of Irish Americans who self-identify as Protestant should be characterized as being descended from the Irish Catholic population, because while there are anecdotal examples of conversions by Catholics in Ireland and the United States to Protestant churches and of intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in the United States and Ireland, these were historically rare.
To be unambiguous, I am not saying that this never occurred, just that no positive evidence from a reliable source about how prevalent it was has been provided, and considering the research cited by various historians, it is only trivially true that some Irish Americans who self-identify as Protestants descended from Irish Catholics. And speaking as an American who descends from both Irish Catholics and Ulster Scots, I am sick of seeing the history of my ancestors being selectively used for propagandistic purposes on this website, which reverting the article back to before the Jajhill edits would effectively be doing as it would remove all of the historical nuance provided in the current revision. - CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 05:58, 18 June 2019 (UTC)
CommonKnowledgeCreator, I'm afraid your passion for this subject exceeds your understanding. I would ask that you defer to contemporary research into this topic, starting with the work of Kerby Miller, who is by all hands considered a leading expert on Irish immigration history.
The whole point of Carroll's chapter (which I read twice, by the way) was that Michael O's main thesis in A Hidden Phase is generally accepted by modern historians. And his main thesis was that, in the 18th Century, Irish ethnicity was influenced more by the Enlightenment values of equality and brotherhood than by ethnoreligious sectarianism. This is in serious conflict with the changes made by your editing buddy Jajhill.
"and seems oddly reminiscent of the Irish slaves myth"
Oh really? Well take it up with Carroll. In How the Irish Became Protestant in America, Michael P. Carroll wrote, "Indeed, over the past few decades several lines of research have converged to suggest, as O’Brien claimed, that prior to the Famine Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants were not nearly as different in terms of their cultural beliefs and behaviors as they would later become in the popular imagination." He goes on to say, "Although there was a time when scholars quite matter-of-factly took the tie between Catholicism and Irish nationalism to be centuries old (see, for example, Shannon 1960), it is now generally recognized that the tight link that now exists between Catholicism and Irish nationalism was forged in the early nineteenth century and grew stronger as that century progressed (Maume 1998)." And then, "Not only did outsiders blend all the Irish into a single category; so did the Irish themselves." And finally, "However, much evidence suggests that during this period [the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries], “Irish” ethnic identity was much more varied, flexible, and inclusive than it would later become, and the social and political issues that engaged the attention of Irish emigrants … often transcended the religious divisions that later became so prominent."
The line you quoted had nothing to do with anything in my post, and it seems obvious to me that you're either misinterpreting what Carroll wrote or you're guilty of your own charge and haven't read the whole chapter. The part of A Hidden Phase that's been rejected was Michael O's attempt to link particular surnames of Gaelic and Norman-Irish origin to the Catholic religion. But Carroll did not say that these conspicuously Irish names aren't ubiquitous in the colonial records, nor did he say or even insinuate that it wasn't common for the colonial Catholic Irish to convert to Protestantism in the New World. He in fact argues just that: "These early Irish Catholics abandoned their faith, in other words, because they were little attached to official Catholicism, because they did not have access to priests and the institutional structures that might have nurtured their faith, and because of others’ hostility toward Catholicism. Since O’Brien’s time, that story has been repeated, almost word for word, by many other commentators (see, for example, Akenson 1993, 244–246; Byron 1999, 51–52; Doyle 1981, 69–70; Greeley 1988; McCaffrey 1997, 64; McWhiney 1988, 6–7; Miller 1985, 147; K. Miller 2000, 140)."
What I wrote was a summing-up of information in your own reliable source, so I am failing to understand how this is 'reminiscent of the Irish slaves myth'.
Another thing that's been removed from this section is every mention of 17th Century Irish immigration. Five years ago there was a passage that read,
"According to the Dictionary of American History, approximately "50,000 to 100,000 Irishmen, over 75 percent of them Catholic, came to the United States in the 1600s"
And it's now vanished, and not for lack of sourcing. In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (Kerby Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce Boling, David Doyle), page 39 does indeed make mention of this,
"In the seventeenth century, southern Irish Catholics probably constituted a large majority of the relatively few emigrants from Ireland, perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 in all"
The range of 50-100k in the original passage is almost certainly too high, but there is no justification for the removal of all 17th Century immigration history from the colonial section.
"I am sick of seeing the history of my ancestors being selectively used for propagandistic purposes on this website,"
Look, it's obvious that there're a handful or two of 'Scots-Irish' enthusiasts who routinely manipulate these articles with selective sourcing for "propaganda" purposes. I couldn't care less if there were 10 Irish Catholics in colonial America and 200,000 Protestants or 200,000 Catholics and 10 Protestants; my aim is to clean up these American ethnicity pages which are currently pitiful excuses for encyclopedia entries. When you read an encyclopedia it's supposed to sound like it was written by the same person, even when it was a concerted effort of 20. But this page reads like an uncoordinated effort of 20-30 people, and this history section in particular is marred by conflicting information (ie the first line says that half of colonial emigrants came from Southern Ireland, and then your buddy Jajhill claims it was mostly Ulster migrants -- which is it?)
For more reading on the "Scotch-Irish myth", you can check out Miller's work here,

https://books.google.com/books?id=p07s4oueaPMC&pg=PA75&dq=Kerby+A.+Miller&as_brr=3&cd=7#v=onepage&q=Kerby%20A.%20Miller&f=false

Compare this passage to Jajhill's edit:
"Despite penal laws that mandated sharp legal distinctions, the actual ethnoreligious boundaries between Irish Protestants and Catholics, both in Ireland and the American colonies, were much more flexible and permeable than they later became, as evidenced, for example, by the presence and intermarriage with Ulster Protestant settlers of a significant minority of "native" or Irish Catholic immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in 18th Century America."
And you can read about it here as well,

http://downloadbooks.live/pdf/20427084/books-s1s11956484s-1ss2s3efeed6es-2s

I'll leave it here and let other editors weigh in.Jonathan f1 (talk) 07:06, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
@Jonathan f1: "The whole point of Carroll's chapter (which I read twice, by the way) was that Michael O's main thesis in A Hidden Phase is generally accepted by modern historians. And his main thesis was that, in the 18th Century, Irish ethnicity was influenced more by the Enlightenment values of equality and brotherhood than by ethnoreligious sectarianism." Your characterization of Carroll's chapter is misleading. Carroll's chapter is about why most Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry also self-identify as Protestant (hence its title "How the Irish Became Protestant in America"), which is why the fact that O'Brien's first argument is rejected by most historians, about the size of the Irish Catholic migration to the United States in the colonial period, is the more important point from a demographic point of view about the population of Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry than O’Brien’s second argument about cultural similarities between Irish Protestants and Catholics in the Thirteen Colonies. I never disputed what you or Carroll said about cultural similarities between Irish Catholics and Protestants, nor did I dispute that conversion to Protestant churches by some percentage of the minority of the Irish Catholic immigrants to the colonial United States is accepted by most historians.
What I disputed was the characterization of the American population that self-identifies as being of Irish ancestry and also as being Protestant as being either primarily or substantially descended from Irish Catholics based upon historical accounts and historical data available on rates of intermarriage by Irish Catholics with Ulster Protestants in both the United States and Ireland or conversion by Irish Catholics to Protestant churches in both the United States and Ireland because the text of the article at one point stated that "Most descendants of the Protestant Irish today identify their ancestry as simply 'American' or 'Irish',[12][13] they were descendants of Native Irish, Scottish and English... However religious numbers should be noted in context that at this period of time the Roman Catholic religion was proscribed and discouraged and that many Protestants are descendants of Catholics by logical definition." Such a characterization gives the reader the impression that the Protestants in Ireland and their descendants in the United States descended equally from Irish Catholics, Scots, and English, which by all of the historical accounts and data cited in the current article is false.
Additionally, both of the sources you have cited for 17th century Irish immigration to the Thirteen Colonies are in fact overestimates (which I presume is why the reference you say that was included in the article several years ago was removed). According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the population of the Thirteen Colonies by 1690 was approximately 210,000, with the racial composition approximately 193,000 White (92 percent) and approximately 17,000 Black (8 percent). (p. 1168) According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, 90 percent of the U.S. population in 1690 was English (approximately 189,000), leaving the remaining 2 percent (approximately 4,000) for all other European ancestries in the Thirteen Colonies (which would also include people of Dutch, French, German, and Scottish ancestry). (Erickson) By 1700, the population of the Thirteen Colonies increased to approximately 251,000, with the white population increasing to approximately 223,000 (89 percent) and the black population to 28,000 (11 percent). From 1690 to 1700, the percentage of the U.S. population of English ancestry declined to 80 percent (or approximately 201,000), while 4 percent of the population was Dutch (approximately 10,000) and 3 percent of the population was Scottish (approximately 7,000), once again leaving 2 percent (approximately 5,000) for all other European ancestries, (p. 99) which cannot be attributed entirely to Irish immigration from this period because the Thirteen Colonies were also experiencing immigration from England and Germany during the 17th century. (Conzen)
@Jonathan f1: Also, just checked Miller et. al in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003). You left an important detail out of your quotation: "In the seventeenth century, southern Irish Catholics probably constituted a large majority of the relatively few emigrants from Ireland, perhaps 30,000–50,000 in all, who crossed the Atlantic and settled primarily in the West Indies and Chesapeake." (p. 39) In other words, the 30,000-50,000 figure you cited is for emigrants from Ireland to the New World as a whole in the 17th century, not the Thirteen Colonies in particular. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:15, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
To reiterate, I am not disputing that there is a minority among the American population that self-identifies as being of Irish ancestry and also as being Protestant that descends from Irish Catholics, but it is not that substantial statistically and should be characterized as such. You have now provided me with the anecdotal information and references to do so which will further nuance the article. Thank you. However, I do not understand why you would not just make such edits yourself, which is why reverting the article to the version prior to the Jajhill edits is unnecessary and the justifications for doing so baseless. (As for my comments about the Irish slaves myth, I struck them through as an apology, which if you did not interpret them that way, is what I intended). -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 08:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Erickson, Charlotte J. (1980). "English". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Harvard University Press. p. 323. ISBN 978-0674375123.
  • Conzen, Kathleen Neils (1980). "Germans". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Harvard University Press. p. 407. ISBN 978-0674375123. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk • contribs) 08:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
How do you know it's a "minority"? You're assuming that contemporary Irish-American Protestants all descended from Colonial settlers, and that a majority of them were Scottish in origin, and then perhaps a minority were Catholic converts. This is not necessarily true, and there is no evidence to indicate that this is even plausible. What Carroll's research showed was that Irish-American Protestants are split 50-50 between areas where the Colonial Irish settled and areas where the post-Colonial Irish settled. Now I know it is problematic to use early settlement patterns as an indicator for modern day ancestries, but that's unfortunately what Carroll did.
The issue is, this article attempts to imply that the majority of Irish Americans are descended from early Scots-Irish settlers, based on contemporary religious affiliations. There is no evidence this is true, and a near "zero" chance of it turning out correct. There were millions more Irish than Scots-Irish who immigrated, and while the Irish spread out from the Northeast to the West Coast, the Scots-Irish were relatively contained in Appalachia. Carroll's data shows a 50-50 split between Irish-American Protestants in the South (Scots-Irish country) and IA Protestants in non-Southern regions (Northeast, West Coast, etc).Jonathan f1 (talk) 09:05, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Flawed conclusion?

The following quote appears in the article, and I have made bold the conclusion.

"consistent majorities or pluralities of Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry as also self-identifying as being Protestant, and thus are actually Scotch-Irish."

Personally, I feel this conclusion doesn't logically follow. A Scotch-Irish person isn't simply a protestant of Irish descent. While it's likely that a significant part of these protestant Irish-Americans actually are of Scotch-Irish descent. It is also quite possible that most of them are descended from peoples who converted after immigrating. Additionally, the two sources used to back up this claim aren't exactly strong. The first one simply lists a definition of what Scotch-Irish descent means. The latter seems to make the conclusion that all protestants of Irish descent must be Scotch-Irish, but without any basis. --2600:6C40:6B80:245:1C98:D7AA:32CF:63C (talk) 09:52, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

It's almost impossible trying to talk sense with the "Scotch-Irish" fan club. They consistently cherry pick sources, manipulate content, and make baseless claims in articles. The whole purpose of that line you quoted was to boost (artificially) the number of Scotch-Irish Americans, which appears to be their sole objective in editing this page. The editors doing this need to be blocked from this article.
Anyway, there are a number of problems with this assumption. The first problem is that not all Irish Protestants are located in regions where the Scotch-Irish settled. It is true that the overwhelming majority of Irish Americans in the South are Protestant, but it is also true that Irish Catholics only have a slight lead over the Protestants in the non-South; in fact, they are almost evenly split in non-Southern regions. Here is the data from Michael P. Carroll's How the Irish Became Protestant in America, which is being used as a reliable source for this article, particularly on the subject of religion.
South: 73% Protestant, 19% Catholic
Non-South: 39% Protestant, 45% Catholic
A massive 73% of Irish Americans in the South claim a Protestant religious background. But here's the thing: that's a percentage of the number of people who claim Irish ancestry in the South, and Irish ancestry is not a major ethnicity down there, not to mention the South as a whole is sparsely populated compared to the Northeast. The vast majority of Irish Americans are concentrated in the Northeast, so out of the sample used in this survey, that 73% actually translates to 388 people while the 39% in non-Southern regions translates to 375 people. So we're talking about a measly 13 person difference here.
In addition, if these percentages actually hold, it is conceivable and probable that the number of Irish Protestants in the non-South, despite being less than non-South Catholics in percentage terms, is actually greater than that of Southern Irish Protestants. So if we're using regions to determine ancestry then it can't be true that 'all' Irish Protestants in America are 'Scotch-Irish' descendants -- this claim is positively false on this basis alone.
Just imagine a simple scenario where there are 300 Irish Americans in the country, and 200 of them are in the North and 100 in the South. The entire Northern population descends from Irish Catholics, but 90 of them converted to Protestantism. That makes the North 45% Protestant and 55% Catholic. In the South, there are 75 Protestants descended from Scotch-Irish and 25 Irish Catholics. The South is 75% Protestant and 25% Catholic. Now we have a similar situation as above:
North: 45% Protestant, 55% Catholic
South: 75% Protestant, 25% Catholic
Total: 55% Protestant, 45% Catholic
Now clearly Protestants are 45% in the North vs 75% in the South, but that 45% translates to 90 Irish American Protestants in the North vs. 75 in the South. And further, of the 300 Irish Americans in the example, 225 of them are descended from Irish Catholics and only 75 from Scotch-Irish (75% vs 25%)
What these Scotch-Irish editors try to do in a situation like this is, they'll take the 55% figure for the Protestants, claim all of these Protestants are Scotch-Irish descendants, and voila -- you have a Scotch-Irish majority.
But of course using regions to determine ancestry is another problem. You would have to imagine that, in the last 170 years or so, no Irish Catholics migrated to the South, intermarried with Protestants, or simply changed religions. If anyone has hard evidence that this is the case, by all means cite. But for now this strikes me as a fantasyland scenario.
I fully support removing this bit from the article.Jonathan f1 (talk) 02:45, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
It does appear to be a pretty silly statement and the sources don't appear to explicitly support it. Beach drifter (talk) 04:57, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
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