Chapter 7: “Dinnae despise the migrants, laddie – we were there onct werselves.”

Although the McQuoids were to play an honourable part in the history of the North of Ireland they were once strangers to the land.

The family originated from the shire of Argyle in the North of Scotland, a sept of the Mackay clan.

It was in the late 1600's that there was an exodus from Scotland of men and women seeking freedom and a better life in Ireland.

The landlords (many of them ‘absentee’) were finding sheep more profitable than peasants.

Not only was work denied them but the peasants had a resentment that the Episcopalian way of worship that was being foisted upon them was too akin to Roman Catholicism to be endured.

So they gathered their goods and chattels and trudged the long road across the mountainous countryside to Portpatrick about twenty miles across the sea to Donaghadee, a sea trip that would be undertaken in an open boat.

In this minor footnote to the history of the migration it is estimated about 800 families came to Ulster, about half to Donaghadee and the remainder to Carnlough and Glenarm.

The graveyards along that coast of County Down until about fifteen miles inland give testimony to the McQuoid men, women and children who died from 1720 onwards.

Gilnahirk Presbyterian churchyard in the East of Belfast is where Samuel and Sarah McQuoid of Willowfield Street lie. David (Samuel's father) and his wife are also buried there, one in 1902 and the other in 1907.

James McQuoid who died on 18 October l901 aged 72 years and may have been an uncle of Samuel is buried at Castlereagh. There was also cousin, Samuel, who lived in the same area (Moneyrea) in the 1930's.

There was for many years, a metal rail incorporating an engraved plaque which marked the McQuoid family burying place.

Gordon remembers that at a young age with a reputation for ‘being good with his hands’ he was asked by his Grandmother McQuoid to ‘freshen up’ the headstone of his grandfather’s headstone who died in 1939, the year that saw the outbreak of the Second World War

For many in Northern Ireland, ‘migrants’ and ‘travellers’ have come to represent the face of the ‘needy in society.

One wonders what the native population thought of those early itinerant Scots when they arrived, bundled in rough clothes, even strange-looking tartans, when they came looking for work.

The gap between poverty and (by the standards of the time) comfortable urban existence was quickly jumped by the hard-working McQuoid clan and continues to this day.

But remember, anytime there’s a move to toughen up the laws against the immigrants, that we were there once, ourselves.