I realize that the word "Scotch" is properly applied only to the whisky, not to the people, but the longtime common American usage, proper or not, is "Scotch-Irish."

The bulk of the original Scotch-Irish population was recruited and moved en masse from the Ulster "planation" to the southern American colonies (Georgia and the Carolinas) not long after the same people (same families, anyway) were picked up from Scotland and installed in the north of Ireland to replace the disposessed original residents. They did not actually spend much time in Ireland -- just a generation, or two at most.

This group overlapped with another large contingent of early Southern white settlers, the "indentured servants" supplied by the English Crown to populate Georgia and, to a lesser extent, the other Southern colonies. These folks were essentially enslaved for a fixed number of years, after which they would be freed. Many were prisoners (including debtors'-prison inmates and political rebels), so this population included plenty of Celtic people ("Irish-Irish," Scots from Scotland, and Welsh as well as "Scotch-Irish") along with a representative number of Anglo-Saxon Brits.

Presumably, the indentured-servant population must have included plenty of native (i.e., Catholic) Irish, but since the Roman Church was not tolerated in the colonies to which these people were shipped, and no priests or churches were available, these new colonists would have become Protestants if they were to practice any religion at all, and would have been assimilated into the dominant Protestant Scotch-Irish community.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that *eleven* US Presidents have been of Scotch-Irish descent (compared to just one with Catholic-Irish forebearers, JFK). I can't name them all, but Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan are among them. I think that statistic may have been published prior to the inauguration of Clinton, who has ancestors from both the Irish and Scotch-Irish groups, along with plenty of "WASPs" (Anglo-Saxons) as well.