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Ed: Ian Adamson has forwarded to me an email he has received from Laura Spence of BBC Northern Ireland. Laura describes herself as "Producer, Ulster-Scots" at the Beeb.

When I sent out the BBC Ulster-Scots survey last year, you wrote to tell me that you'd like some drama. You also said you wanted more authentic Ulster-Scots language on the airwaves - and you asked for something humorous.

Well, I'm delighted to tell you that all those requests will be met in a new radio series going on air this summer. Over the next six weeks, starting on Sunday 18th July, BBC Radio Ulster will be broadcasting a series of dramatised readings, first performed in the 19th century as humorous monologues.

‘Robin’s Readings’ were created by WG Lyttle, born in 1844. After his death in 1896, he was buried in the grounds of Bangor Abbey where his memorial describes him as: "… a brilliant and graceful writer… and a true son of County Down".

As well as being the author of 'Sons of the Sod', 'Daft Eddie' and 'Betsy Gray', Lyttle was above all an entertainer. He most often appeared at social gatherings in the guise of his alter-ego "Robin", a jovial country farmer from the fictitious Ballycuddy in County Down, who regaled his audiences in Ulster-Scots. The scripts from these performances were subsequently collected and published as ‘Robin’s Readings’.

The stories recount the adventures and mishaps of Paddy McQuillan, a cheerful but unfortunate County Down farmer. In the first few episodes, Paddy (played by Will McAvoy) attempts to join a Masonic Lodge, visit Glasgow, and thwart his mother’s attempts to match him with the formidable Miss Norris. Paddy’s best friend, Robin Gordon (played by Paddy McAvoy) takes up the story of Paddy’s marriage and the birth of his children - before this first series concludes with Paddy’s emigration to Canada.

There’s a real warmth and humour in these stories - even though they're about 150 years old. What comes across is the sense of a close, rural community sharing in each other’s joys and troubles. Lyttle wrote in authentic Ulster-Scots, which was spoken throughout the Ards Peninsula - and I’m delighted that all the participants in this radio series are native Ulster-Scots speakers who bring the language to life again.

I sincerely hope you'll enjoy these programmes: it's been great fun making them. Please do get in touch and let me know what you think. Full programme details are at the bottom of this email - and of course, if you miss them on the radio, you can listen again online with the BBC iPlayer.

[Ed: I presume that these are all BBC Radio Ulster]

Sunday 18th July 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 22nd July 2010 7.30pm

EPISODE 1 - HIS CHRISTMAS DAY
This is the first in a series of humorous stories, featuring the trials and adventures of Mr Paddy McQuillan: in this first episode, it's Christmas Day and Paddy goes to Belfast where he has a rather unfortunate encounter at a Masonic Lodge....

EPISODE 2 - HIS TRIP TO GLASGOW (Part 1)
This story begins with Paddy deciding, despite his mother’s grave misgivings, to visit Glasgow . On board the ferry, he falls in with a Scotsman called Sauny who takes him in hand and promises to show him the sights of the city, starting with a Glasgow Eating House…. This story concludes next week.

Sunday 25th July 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 29th July 2010 7.30pm

EPISODE 3 - HIS TRIP TO GLASGOW (Part 2)
Continued from last week. Paddy McQuillan is in Glasgow with his new friend, Sauny. Following some trouble at the Post Office when he tries to collect a money order, Paddy goes shopping - but winds up before the magistrate! Having talked his way out of a custodial sentence, he takes the ferry back home to his relieved mother.

Sunday 1st August 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 5th August 2010 7.30pm

EPISODE 4 - HIS COURTSHIPS
Paddy McQuillan’s mother arranges for him to take tea with the formidable Miss Norris - in the hope of making a match for him. Paddy, however, takes a shine to the younger and more appealing Maggie Patten and sets out to court her instead. All doesn’t exactly go smoothly however with the course of true love….

Sunday 8th August 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 12th August 2010 7.30pm
EPISODE 5 - HIS WEDDING
In preparation for his forthcoming wedding, Paddy McQuillan sets off to Belfast to get the wedding licence. Then he and Maggie purchase a few essentials in the shops - before it’s time at last for the Big Day!

EPISODE 6 - HIS WEE PADDY and THA CHRISNIN’
A new arrival means new worries for Paddy McQuillan - what with potential hazards round the house and constant crying throughout the night! However, plans for the baby’s christening soon give Paddy more to think about as he arranges a party for all his friends.

Sunday 15th August 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 19th August 2010 7.30pm

EPISODE 7 - HIS TWINS
Robin Gordon is very amused to hear that his friends Paddy and Maggie McQuillan have just had twins! Friends gather round to meet the new-borns and congratulate their parents - and Paddy is persuaded to have a celebratory tea-party.

EPISODE 8 - PADDY McQUILLAN’S TAY PERTY (Part 1)
Robin Gordon and Paddy McQuillan start making arrangements for a tea party to celebrate the arrival of Paddy’s twins.

Sunday 22nd August 2010 4.03pm / Repeat Wednesday 26th August 2010 7.30pm

EPISODE 9 - PADDY McQUILLAN’S TAY PERTY (Part 2)
It’s Paddy McQuillan’s Tay Perty and friends and family all gather round to help the McQuillan’s christen their new twins - Samuel and Jemima. With poetry, songs and a presentation to Maggie, everyone has a great time.

EPISODE 10 - McQUILLAN ABROAD
It’s a sad time in County Down - for Paddy McQuillan and his family have been forced, by their rackrenting landlord, to sell up and emigrate to Canada . All their County Down friends gather to bid them farewell.

Code: Picts
[Ed: For those puzzled why I include this code word, the reason is this. 'Ian Adamson' is a common name and so an Internet search on thgis yields a lot of material. A search on 'ian adamson picts' cuts the field down quite a lot, and 'ian adamson impala picts' still more.]

Ed: On his return the Somme commemoration in France, Ian Adamson has supplied, as promised, the final part of his report on his recent cultural visit to Dublin in company with Lord Bannside (Ian Paisley). This is continued from Part 2 (Monday, June 21. 2010);-

Dr Paisley (Lord Bannside) Visit: Part 3
by Councillor Dr Ian Adamson OBE

On the morning of Friday 4th of June 2010, along with John Kennedy and Denis Carr, I accompanied Dr Paisley (Lord Bannside) to Harcourt Street, named after Lord Simon Harcourt who was a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1772 to 1776. Harcourt Street is a fine Georgian street that is largely intact and leads away from St Stephens Green. Dr Paisley’s father, the Rev J Kyle Paisley, was a Baptist minister who separated from the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1935 and became an Independent Baptist Pastor. Of particular interest therefore were the Baptist Union meetings held in the Harcourt Street Baptist Church premises which Dr Paisley’s father attended. Before searching out the church we had tea at 4 Harcourt Street where Sir Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson of Duncairn, the great lawyer and Unionist politician, was born, on 9th February 1854.

As we walked down Harcourt Street we also stopped at Number 6, the residence in 1854 of John Henry Cardinal Newman, the first Director of University College Dublin. The centrepiece of Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain this September, of course, will be the beatification, which is one step short of canonization, of Cardinal Newman. It must be said however that many admirers of the eminent Victorian cleric and convert remain uneasy about the ceremony because they see him as rather too worldly to be a candidate for sainthood. Newman himself dismissed this very process for himself during his long and controversial lifetime. Newman was indeed very wary of the Vatican saying famously that he would “drink to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards”.

But it was the Gaelic bookshop at 6 Harcourt Street which we found out later was the most interesting of the lot. Dr Paisley, Baroness Paisley and I were invited into the bookshop by John Kennedy who had spotted a book by John Biggs-Davison MP – “The Cross of St Patrick – the Catholic Unionist Tradition in Ireland, London 1985”. This he bought and presented to Dr Paisley as a memento of his trip to Harcourt Street.

Sir John Alec Biggs-Davison was born on 7 June 1918 and died on 17 September 1988. His daughter Lisl of the “Friends of the Union” organisation, which I joined as a Life Member in 1992, promoted my books and sent me a lovely photograph of him when he died, which I keep in his book “The Hand is Red”, London 1973. While at Oxford University a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as one usually is, he became Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom for Chigwell from 1955 and then after boundary changes in 1974, Epping Forest, until his death. He was a leading figure in the Conservative Monday Club. He likened the suspension and subsequent abolition of the Parliament in Northern Ireland by Edward Heath as equivalent to someone” sawing away the branch he bestraddles”.

My friend Ruairí Ó Bléine has explained some of the history of this bookshop in a letter which I append.

We then returned to Farmleigh to meet up again with Baroness Paisley. We were met again by Mary Heffernan, the General Manager. Mary showed us the great Library at Farmleigh where we viewed among other books the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels by Dean Swift and the primer in Latin, Irish and English of Queen Elizabeth the First. At 12 o’clock we departed for Áras an Úachtaráin where we had lunch with the President Mary McAleese and Dr Martin McAleese accompanied by Adrian O’Neill, the Secretary General of Áras an Úachtaráin. Her Excellency had dedicated a plaque to the memory of the individual regiments who formed the 10th Irish Division, their comrades in arms and their brave Turkish adversaries during a ceremony organised by the Somme Association on 24 March this year at Greenhill Cemetery in Gallipoli. We will always been in her debt.

We then travelled on to the historic site of the Battle of the Boyne at Oldbridge, County Meath and were welcomed there by Minister Martin Mansergh. He recalled the special occasion of Dr Paisley’s first official visit on 11 May 2007, just three days after he was appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland. On that occasion, he planted a commemorative tree – Walnut (Juglans Regis) - and returned a year later on 6 May 2008 to officially open the new OPW Visitors Centre based in Oldbridge House jointly with the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern on his last full day in office. Minister Mansergh again showed Dr Paisley the tree, which is thriving in its position in the walled garden, and recalled those previous historic occasions of which there is photographic record in the Visitors Centre in Oldbridge House.

Dr Paisley said he was delighted to see the site was proving such a success as a visitor and tourist attraction, something he encouraged and supported considering that it symbolises shared history of all of Ireland. The Minister presented Dr Paisley with a signed copy of a guidebook “Battle of the Boyne – Campaign for the English Crown” by Michael McNally. Dr Paisley, Lady Paisley and the Minister then signed a framed photograph marking the 2007 visit for display at the Visitors Centre. Commenting on the entire visit to Dublin, Minister Mansergh said that, whilst private and low-key, it was a landmark in the improving of relations on the island. Dr Paisley wanted to underline what we have in common, including shared sacrifices on the battlefield, notwithstanding the important differences that will remain. As we left the Boyne Valley we passed a signpost to Newgrange and also to the Ledwidge Cottage. Francis Ledwidge’s memorial I was to see several weeks later at Messines near Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium.

[Code: Picts]

Ed: Dr. Ruairí Ó Bléine (a.k.a. Roger Blaney) adds this note on the Bookshop in Harcourt Street, Dublin, which the political pair visited -

Number 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin

This is the Headquarters of Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League), the senior organisation concerned with the promotion of Irish as a spoken language. It was co-founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), the son of a Roscommon Church of Ireland Minister.

The League moved in 1965 to Harcourt Street from its previous premises in Parnell Square. I became much more familiar with this house from 1996, which I was elected to the Coiste Gnó (Business Committee) at one of the very few times that the Ard-Fheis (AGM) was held in Belfast. For six consecutive years afterwards I was again elected, and finally retired as Tanáiste (Vice-President) in 2002.

It is a fascinating building in its history and in the activities it houses. The ground floor is partly given up to the work of a very comprehensive bookshop, selling not only virtually all publications in print in the Irish language but including volumes in the other Celtic languages as well. Under the shop is a basement given over to the Gaelic League Club, which includes a licensed premises and, during my time at the Headquarters, a tunnel below the Club was discovered. Some investigation then revealed the true significance of the role of 6 Harcourt Street in Irish history. This tunnel and another subsequently discovered under the Street itself, when digging was being carried out in relation to the “LUAS” the new street trams, were found to be escape routes for Michael Collins, who, in this house, ran the finances of the rebel government set up in 1918.

The entrance of the tunnels is accessed by a neat pair of trap-doors, undetected for many years. The house is a centre for learning Irish and for this purpose there are many capacious rooms upstairs. It is also the centre for the organisation of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, which runs musical and arts festivals twice a year in various places throughout the country, mainly in the Gaeltacht. A conversation class in Scottish Gaelic meets once per month and is very popular.

After our meetings we used to adjourn to the nearby hostelry for refreshments, a place numbered 4 Harcourt Street, which happens to be the birth-place of Sir Edward Carson.

From Number Six are co-ordinated the 200 odd branches of the Gaelic League. About 50 of these are in Ulster under the aegis of Comhaltas Uladh, which also has a scheme for sending young people to the Irish Summer Colleges in the Donegal Gaeltacht.

Ed's comments: An interesting trip! The Cross of St Patrick, which I read many years ago, is a substantial book which Biggs-Davison in collaboration with a researcher who performed, I guess, much of the original research. Biggs-Davison concluded that there never was a "Cross of St Patrick". Patrick was not a martyr, and so was not entitled to having a cross in his coat-of-arms. Biggs-Davison guessed that, as an Irish emblem, it comes down from the once-mighty Fitzgerald family. Besides its incorporation in the Union Flag, the only occasions I've seen it flown on its own in a serious way is on Anglican (Church of Ireland) churches on St Patrick's Day. But Biggs-Davison uncovered a rich Irish Roman Catholic Unionist tradition, largely forgotten today. The Unionists once held the City of Galway, for goodness sake!

I joined the Friends of the Union myself at or before its first local meeting in the Ulster Hall in, perhaps, 1987, and remained a member until the organisation folded. It did much good work.

Blog Links

Dr Paisley (Lord Bannside) visit: Part 1, by Cllr Dr Ian Adamson OBE, Monday, June 14. 2010

Dr Paisley (Lord Bannside) visit: Part 2, by Cllr Dr Ian Adamson OBE, Monday, June 21. 2010

Lord Bannside and Dr Paisley, by Cllr Dr Ian Adamson, Wednesday, June 23. 2010

Concluded