Cllr Ian Adamson OBE is a former Lord Mayor of Belfast. He is a member of the Ulster Unionist Party and is a retired medical doctor. A councillor on Belfast City Council from 1989 until 2011, Adamson was lord mayor in 1996. He studied at Bangor Grammar School then Queen's University Belfast becoming a registrar in pediatrics at the Royal Victoria Hospital for Sick Children and the Ulster Hospital. He speaks ten languages, including Scots, Lakota Sioux and Swahili. He is founder chair of the Ulster-Scots Language Society, and remains a vice-president. In liaison with Professor Robert Gregg in 1992, he founded the Ulster-Scots Academy. He is the author of several books on subjects such as folk poetry, history and religion. His 1974 book Cruthin, garnered controversy for its claims that the ancient Cruthin were a pre-Gaelic people who were driven from Ireland to Scotland and that their modern descendants are the Ulster Scots Protestants who merely returned to their old homeland during the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster. 

Northern Ireland