In the confusion of American history, it also seems important to point out that the first Irish to have an impact on the New World were Orangemen, not Roman Catholics. These were men and women of Northern Irish Protestant stock rushing into the New World to escape the dictates of a Puritan English monarchy. Orange was once the color of revolution as well. By the end of the 17th century, the strength behind the democratic movement in both Ireland and America came from the Protestant, not the Catholic Irish, community.
When the forces of democracy were crushed in Ireland and a rebel organization called the United Irishman splintered into so many pieces, and its largely Protestant leadership was banished into exile, some of the best of those leaders picked up their rifles and headed for the American wilderness. Some of those first Irish Protestants found a home among the Yankee power brokers of the Eastern seaboard, but the more restless followed the Appalachian trail west, southwest, past the old Indian frontiers. Indeed, some direct descendants of these frontier people can still be found in the hollers and back vales of those mountains to this very day.
It is once again a matter of blind historic irony to note that some of these descendants today provide core support for many of the more right-wing, fundamentalist movements that have violently attempted to purge the South of the influence of later immigrant groups like the Jews, the Catholic Irish and of course those African-Americans who were dragged to these shores in chains.
Ian Paisley, for example, the leading Protestant demagogue of contemporary Northern Ireland, took his preaching degree from Bob Jones University in the Carolinas. When Paisley visits the South these days -- as he has done a number of times during the past decade to raise money -- the people he finds there, he is fond of saying, are not a whole lot different from the people he left behind back in Antrim. This is not Paisley metaphor. The preacher is talking here of actual kin.