Boston Tea Party 250 - the Ulster-Scots / Scots-Irish / Scotch-Irish dimension

I'm just back from a trip to Boston with the Ulster-Scots Agency, to take part in the 250th anniversary commemorations of the Boston Tea Party. It's a truly historic place and is still effectively the capital city of the five New England states. While there I did a series of impromptu, unscripted, unedited, 'selfie' videos at some key locations and monuments, to tell the often overlooked Ulster-Scots / Scotch-Irish / Scots-Irish story of Boston and Massachusetts more widely. These were posted on the Agency's Facebook page during our trip.

These are just a handful of the vast array of Ulster-Scots stories that prepare the way for the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which is coming up on 4 July 2026. It is the focal date for the official America250 project whose branding went live at the start of December – the Boston Tea Party 250 events were effectively its public launch. Hope you enjoy these videos - hesitations, stumbles, minor mistakes and all.

The trip was a packed schedule with a dizzying amount of meetings, all of which were very exciting. So much positivity there. As well as these seven videos, I had also hoped to do a video about Dr Thomas Young (19.02.1731–28.06.1777, Wikipedia here) at the beautiful Old South Meeting House, but it's in the middle of the main shopping district so the busyness and noise meant that doing a selfie video there wasn't possible. Maybe with a proper TV crew it could have worked! Below are a few stills of it, and if you want to find out more about Young and his role in the Boston Tea Party then just use the search bar on the left of this page. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts have this information about him.

 

Maybe I should drive south to Corboy Presbyterian Church in County Longford, from where Thomas Young's parents emigrated, and do a video there instead. It's still the same building that they worshipped in.

Thomas Young gave his life for the cause of American liberty and independence, dying of fever in Philadelphia on 28 June 1777 during the revolutionary war and being buried in an unmarked mass grave. Many of his contemporaries and fellow 'Sons of Liberty' revolutionaries who did make it through went on to become 'Founding Fathers' – and subjects for statue sculptors, portrait painters and memoir publishers – whose heroic depictions of them would shape the 'nation building' project of the United States of America.

Thomas Young deserves to be known today. As this article says, published on WBUR (Boston's NPR) just last week, he was one of 'the real leaders of the movement' alongside Samuel Adams and John Hancock.