By Editorial
It is Independence Day in the United States – the 249th anniversary of the declaration of independence, which was adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, but not fully written or signed until the following month. There was a charming myth that this newspaper was the first in Europe to report the declaration, when we had it on our page in late August of that year, but in fact it was printed in London a number of days earlier. Even so, we are one of the very few newspapers in the world to have been reporting events decades before the 1776 declaration (we were founded in 1736) and still to be publishing daily so much later. In the earliest News Letters of the 1730s there are plenty of reports from the then American colonies, including stories about how unhappy the colonists were – but not because they wanted to leave Britain, but because they felt London was not doing enough to counter aggressive Spanish trading and shipping in the Caribbean. There was no hint then of independence, a reflection of how moods can change in unpredictable ways. That does not mean, as Irish separatists think, that an all Ireland is inevitable (we report today about disagreements on that point), but rather that we cannot know. Few of Northern Ireland’s founders thought it would last so long. In other words, the mood drifted away from an all Ireland in the decades post 1921. Meanwhile, as the successful visit of unionist Stormont ministers to Washington DC on St Patrick’s Day showed, Northern Ireland can still build on very old cultural links to America – to which the letter writer opposite refers. Next year is the 250th anniversary of the most advanced nation in human history. It is time to renew those important ties between and emphasise the role of Scots Irish in the US.