I’m getting a real bee in my bonnet about this Ulster Scots twaddle. The website www.prodsabroad.com describes it as ” the greatest revival of a culture since the state of Israel was reborn.” The site is so called because “The term “prods” is an affectionate ulster scots term for Protestants hence our site name “Prodsabroad.com”. That is not the whole story. The name is very unsubtle code for “no fenians here”. So not just does an “ethnic” identity have an entirely religious content. The Ulster Scots “movement chooses to identify itself with the colonial, regional imperialist, murderous Israeli state. This is very apt.

One carriage in the “peace process” gravy train is the Ulster Scots Agency or “Boord o Ulster Scotch”. It has started producing a free newspaper The Ulster Scot. Its production values are substantially higher than those of Socialist Resistance, though this may be hard to believe. It’s full colour throughout, very well designed and printed to a high quality. It’s only trouble is that it’s a bit thin on content. Half of the thing is photos of men in kilts. Two full pages are devoted to UVF men who got themselves killed by the Germans in the First World War. There’s an absurd piece on “A prolific tradition of writing in Ulster”. Maybe.  But it was nearly all in standard English not this invented supremacist doggerel.

The centre spread is the killer. It celebrates the arrival of 10 000 lowland Scots in the north of Ireland in 1606. To use an analogy from Palestinan history this was the equivalent of the settlers driving them off their land and claiming it was empty.

Every single aspect of this Ulster Scots movement is reactionary. It celebrates colonialism. It revels in the carnage of the First World War as a blood sacrifice to the British Empire. Its heroes are the members of Europe’s first mass counter revolutionary militia, the UVF. It relies entirely on “peace process” funding. It has an explicitly sectarian definition of what it means to be “Ulster Scots”. And it’s a joke language that no one speaks with an a fabricated range of “cultural” activities. Apart from that it’s brilliant.