Burns Night celebrations across Northern Ireland this weekend will have an added political twist as well as the tartan-wearing, haggis-eating nostalgia of parties in Scots' communities around the world.
A growing number of Northern Ireland's Protestants are working to establish their Ulster-Scot cultural identity in competition with their
Catholic fellow countrymen's Irish Gaelic identity.
For them the Lowland Scots' poet, Robbie Burns, is an icon. As well as traditional toasts to the haggis there will be toasts in one of the European Union's most recently recognised minority languages, Ulster Scots.
Burns' almost indecipherable dialect is the nearest thing Ulster Scots have to proof that the language they claim as their birthright is real, even though it was only identified as a language in 2000, when the British Government registered it as a European Union minority language as part of the peace negotiations that achieved the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the St Andrews Agreement of 2005.
Only 4 per cent of Northern Ireland's 1.5 million people speak Irish Gaelic, which was already registered with the EU.
Far fewer speak Ulster Scots, which has only developed its own dictionary and been recognised as anything other than an argot of the Protestant working class back streets since 2000.
But the tiny number of speakers in no way reduces the passion of the many Protestants who want to promote this as their cultural and racial identity. An important test of their political muscle will come later this year, when the power sharing executive set up last year after the St Andrews Agreement and lead by the Protestant First Minister, the Rev Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and his Catholic Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, will act to introduce an Irish Language Act, to promote the use of Irish Gaelic.
The legislation will mirror that in Wales and Scotland, which gives status to Welsh and Scots Gaelic and also funds education in those languages. The Irish Republic has similar protection for Irish Gaelic. Protestants, many of them members of Paisley's DUP, want parity.
The debates will sound comical to outsiders, but the separate Catholic and Protestant identities the language issue highlights are far too real for politicians in London and Dublin, anxious to keep Stormont's show on the road, to ignore.
