No one in Mid Ulster speaks Irish as their first language.
Although Scots dominated in much of County Down, there were also Yorkshiremen in North Down (Braidwood, 1964:14); people from Devon, Cheshire, and Lancashire settled in the northwest of the county and along the River Lagan (Braidwood, 1964:20), where we find Moira, another of our locations. Bordering on this area, in South Antrim, two of the biggest Plantation landlords, Lord Lieutenant (or Viceroy) Sir Arthur Chichester and Moses Hill, also introduced settlers from Devon, Cheshire, and Lancashire (Braidwood, 1964:11–12, 14). Moira, located midway between the towns of Lisburn and Lurgan, was settled by the English (Braidwood, 1964:21). The Englishness of this part of Ulster was still praised in the late eighteenth century, when Lurgan was known as "Little England," according to one traveller (Luckombe, 1780). And of Lisburn, Hume (1878:8–9) commented that "Until the end of the last century there was a tradition in Ulster that pure English was spoken in the neighbourhood of Lisburn." In the 1830s, Moira was mixed in religion, though local school registers indicate a predominance of Anglicans, a sign of Englishness (Day & McWilliams, 1992a:119–120). The dialect was, therefore, probably Mid-Ulster English.