It is strange how terms take hold or don't take hold. In the first edition of Ullans (the magazine for writing in Ulster-Scots) there is an article on the poet Robert Huddleston who was born in 1814. He wrote his poems in his own Ulster-Scots dialect. He seems to deny the terms Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish. He uses the term Ulster-Irish instead. I would naturally think Ulster-Irish as being the native Gaelic Irish population as I imagine most would think that. But not Huddleston........

"I may not be a Robert Burns to the Lowland Scottish peasantry but at least, let me hope, that I shall one day be a Robert Huddleston to the Ulster Irish"

His reasoning is that in his view the Ulster Scots community were not alien settlers and interlopers but were simply returning to their homeland. ie In regard to the idea that the Scots came originally from Ireland anyway.

He claims that those who called the language Scots or Scotch did so "in unmeaning eccentricity" as that would "tear even the credit of language from its mother land". This of course makes no logical sense as Scots is descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Old Anglo-Saxon and was not brought over by the Gaels from Ireland. It shows how terms can be complicated though and may mean different things to different folk.