The treasurer of Ballymena Services Club, William Miller, hosted the club’s first Burns Night this weekend.<\/p>\n
Speaking before the celebration, he told BBC News NI: “There is a strong Ulster-Scots dimension to the culture of Ballymena.<\/p>\n
“We will have a wee tipple, and we’ll be more confident in our understanding of the role Rabbie Burns has in our Ulster-Scots culture, even today.<\/p>\n
“We encourage as many people as possible to wear tartan. We parade in the haggis, and address the haggis,” he said.<\/p>\n
It’s a night celebrated with the traditional dinner, and a wee dram (whiskey – or whisky, if it is Scottish).<\/p>\n
“After dinner, we have music and poetry all reflecting on the Burns era,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said it’s important people appreciate Burns’ work.<\/p>\n
“We encourage people to just sit down and read the poetry. All of a sudden, they start to see the story,” he continued.<\/p>\n
William believes Burns Night is important to his community’s identity.<\/p>\n
“It helps us understand who we are and where we come from and what the culture is based on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The treasurer of Ballymena Services Club, William Miller, hosted the club’s first Burns Night this weekend. Speaking before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-390028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}