UNIONISM has historically had a problem with regard to claiming people and land.

It raises its head each time the loyal orders demand the right to parade in areas they are not wanted.

It is evident in the annual discontent caused by the erection of loyalist flags in mixed residential communities, village and town centres, a practice manifesting the infamous utterance of the one-time DUP and TUV elected councillor Mel Lucas, who declared “It’s all British, even the bits outside the chapel” when defending loyalist flags put up directly outside a Catholic church in Antrim town.

It is a problem well known to those in the Irish language community who continue to face opposition to their very modest request for a visible presence for the language in the land in which the very names of settlements, townlands and streets derive their meaning from Irish.

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It is an issue which Co Armagh’s young Chris Atherton faced recently after declaring he was making himself eligible to represent the Republic of Ireland at international football, prompting an angry response from those who would seek to deny him the right to choose the international team for which to play.

The communities minister, Gordon Lyons, took it in a different direction when determining that it was time for him to claim for the wee province, in 2026, the men from this part of Ireland who played a part in helping to shape the new United States of America in the latter half of the 18th century- a time when the very idea of a partitioned-off slice of Ireland could only have evoked thoughts and images of the Pale.

The minister’s plans for how to bring the campaign to the States appear to have been somewhat hastily designed.

The official Department for Communities X social media account had to delete a graphic image posted on Sunday which impressively managed to misspell twice and in two different ways ‘Declaration’ when referring to the Declaration of Independence.

In a subsequent post once again released from the official department social media page, it was stated that the minister was arriving in Washington DC “to honour their legacy and invite their descendants to the ultimate homecoming”.

The large writing over the linked image states “They crossed the Atlantic to build a nation…..This summer, it’s your turn to cross back….”

The idea of inviting descendants of immigrants back to the homeland is not new.

‘The Gathering’ was a major tourism initiative launched by the Irish Government and supported by Fáilte Ireland back in 2013 which, though attracting some criticism, did yield dividends in terms of increasing tourist numbers to Ireland.

This followed on from Homecoming Scotland 2009, which again used an emigration story theme to try to bolster tourist numbers. Both involved years of planning in advance to make sure they were a success.

There is nothing at all wrong per se with what Gordon Lyons is endeavouring to do, but the fact that very few people in this part of Ireland – never mind the United States – would have heard anything at all about this particular homecoming campaign prior to this week suggests it is either failing to generate interest, or an idea hastily conceived of with little substantive effort to get it off the ground.

People are also entitled to dispute his attempts to claim exclusively, for the partitioned state today, individuals from history who had no connection with a state that had not even been conceived.

In one of his department’s social media posts, Strabane-born John Dunlap was highlighted, a man famed for printing the first copy of the Declaration of Independence.

“He is very much from Strabane, he is one of us, we are claiming him,” stated Gordon Lyons in an interview this week.

Alas, Dunlap’s story as an Irishman was told in person by the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to Donald Trump in the White House, reflecting the different levels at which politicians north and south engage when across the pond.

The SDLP’s Daniel McCrossan has already called for a statue of Dunlap to be erected in the town, which would immediately hasten a war of words about how he is described in any accompanying engravement.

The departmental social media page also released a graphic about Hercules Mulligan, the Coleraine-born member of the Culper spy ring, a network of spies whose thrilling story is the subject of a riveting television series, Turn.

There are, of course, many ironies in all of this.

Those who successfully built the United States would undoubtedly have been viewed as terrorists by the DUP’s equivalent pro-British loyalists of their day in the colonies and in Britain.

Mulligan’s conduct as an undercover spy in loyalist New York, using deceptive practices to feed information to the rebels, is reminiscent of Michael Collins’s spy network that operated with similar effect against the very same British forces more than a century later.

One can only imagine that the attitude and sentiments regarding the British monarchy held by the Irishmen involved in America’s struggle for freedom would closely match the opinions held throughout history by Irish republicans.

There is no question but that unionism’s sympathies would have been with the loyalists who fled New York, New Jersey and the other colonies in the aftermath of the American victory.

Of the fleeing loyalists who made the trek northwards to Canada, George Washington was uncompromising, decrying them as “unhappy wretches”.

Those that remained in the colonies were forced to take mandatory oaths of allegiance as a result of the new test acts.

The practice of tarring and feathering loyalists before parading them on a rail (a form of public humiliation) was common.

When General Putnam tried to stop the Sons of Liberty parading loyalists in New York, he was reprimanded by George Washington, who stated that “to discourage such proceedings was to inure the cause of liberty in which they were engaged”.

George Washington’s adopted son once famously wrote about “Erin’s generous sons” who “mustered around” and “brilliantly sustained… our friendless standards [when] first unfurled”.

Those sons were of Ireland, but the same self-confident nationalism that accommodated a loyalist flute band in Belfast’s St Patrick’s Day parade can be relaxed about sharing the legacy of men from these shores who owe their fame to their role in defeating the might of the British Empire.

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