https://www.thetimes.com/article/d1788dd7-da0c-4954-b838-716a8ad67959
JD Vance takes pride in declaring himself to be a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart” but a trawl of genealogy records has found no evidence linking the US vice-president to Ireland.

In an attempt to link Vance to Ulster, a DUP minister commissioned researchers to dig into the ancestral past of the controversial Republican Party politician.

A glossy 24-page dossier titled “The Family Footsteps of JD Vance” was produced, but researchers admitted they had “not established a conclusive family link” to Northern Ireland.

Gordon Lyons, the Northern Ireland minister for communities, had been hoping to present a copy of the report personally to Vance over the St Patrick’s Day period in Washington DC.

President Trump’s right-hand man has long claimed to have Celtic links, writing in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

As Scots-Irish, or Ulster-Scots, his family history would be tied directly to plantation-era Scots settlers whose descendants, generations after arrival in Ireland, set out for America.

One historian in Northern Ireland had noted at the time that one of Vance’s ancestors might have been killed during the 1689 Siege of Derry, a powerful event in the unionist story during which Protestants held out in the walled city against Catholic forces for 105 days.

That point was raised within the Department for Communities, as research for the dossier was commissioned via the Public Records Office for Northern Ireland in November.

Emails obtained via a freedom of information request show that in February Lyons’s office was advised that “it has not been possible to establish conclusive proof of a direct Vance link back to Ulster at this stage”.