If someone was a protestant from Belfast say, who moved to the US in the 1800s or 1900s, would they have been viewed as white? Would they have faced the same anti-Irish discrimination as someone who was catholic? And what about those who were earlier descendants of Ulster-Scots people (sometimes called Scotch-Irish)? To my knowledge there were quite a few presidents of Ulster-Scots descent.
To expound on this, was the anti-Irish sentiment primarily racial, or was it just a form of anti-Catholicism?