Baal's fingers on our keys

Scots steel tempered wi' Irish fire

Is the weapon that I desire

Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack Cencrastus, or The Curly Snake, 1930)

In this two-liner from the pit of despair, Scotland's great 20th century man of letters blurted out his first vision of Scottish-Irish relations. These were the years from 1927 to 1930, which also produced the anguish of Lourd on My Hert, To Hell wi' Happiness! and Hokum - his term for the tartan tosh which sold so well in Scotland, even then.

"I can poke 'em and shock 'em and mock 'em", mused MacDiarmid, but the one thing he just couldn't oblige them with was hokum.

The flight from hokum took him and his family into virtual exile on Whalsay island, in Shetland - "the edge of the world", as his son, Michael, later recalled, "a bucket or two of earth in the chilled lapping bitterness of the North Sea".

Here he was to endure the famous double expulsions: from the nascent Scottish National Party (1933, for his unflinching Marxism), and then from the Communist Party (1937, for his unrepentant Nationalism). And here too he returned to the theme of relations between Scotland and Ireland, in what the author intended as "the longest single poem in world literature".

It was called Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn. Heroic Song never appeared as such, although most of what he did later publish represented extracts, fragments or re-written chunks of it (including for instance In Memoriam James Joyce in 1955).

Valda Trevlyn was his second wife, and the dedication of such a colossal endeavour to her was also an attempt to remake himself psychologically. The Irish bit of it was entitled, astonishingly, The Fingers of Baal Contract in the Communist Salute.

The "fingers" were the Celtic nations. Cornwall was naturally represented by Valda, alongside Ireland, Wales, Brittany and Scotland. The Isle of Man, Galicia and Euzkadi also merited inclusion of course, though there is little point in getting pedantic over numbers.

However many the fingers, the resultant clenched fist was mainly for waving under England's nose. But it was also meant to please Joseph Stalin. These were times in which even the stoutest individuals had to choose their poison, and after some experiments with Fascism, MacDiarmid had settled for Stalinism. Indeed the longest poem in the world was intended to prove not simply that the Celts were natural communists, but that they had all originally come from Georgia.

This surprising insight derived from a contemporary work of pseudo-scholarship, Louis Albert's Six Thousand Years of Gaelic Grandeur Unearthed (1936). It deployed a theory of what one might call super-Aryanism, propped up by phoney socio-linguistics. The "Indo-Europeans" (Himmler's chosen ones) were but degenerate offspring of the Agglutinarians, whose presence can infallibly be diagnosed via grammar (they "glue" articles, pronouns, etc. on to their substantives). Basques and Gaels all inherit this spirit-glue, a plain fact systematically concealed by lying historians and forgers.

In The Fingers of Baal MacDiarmid gave it all he'd got via his own personal twist: Racialist Communism:

`Stalin the Georgian' I have said.

We are Georgians all. We Gaels. Let this be lifted upon a banner again To which all our far-flung kin can rally And form a Gaelic Front that none can assail Built on the manifest truth of the Chronicles of the Gael' ...

During the post-Soviet upheavals in the Transcaucusus, I was always afraid some idiot might stumble across Agglutin arianism, and turn up in Edinburgh or Dublin with a solidarity appeal. It looks as that danger has passed. Instead, the five fingers seem to be flexing themselves, getting to know one another and looking for real common interests in a more kindly age.

The last year has witnessed a series of auspicious visits in this sense. Mary Robinson visited the Hebrides in 1997 for the Columba Initiative, arguing strongly that cultural and linguistic affinity ought no longer to translate into support for Republican Nationalism.

More recently First Minister Donald Dewar and the Leader of the SNP Alex Salmond have been in the Republic, and - most important - Bertie Ahern gave a lecture in Edinburgh one year ago, where he quite openly welcomed the development of a stronger Scottish political personality, with which governments in Dublin could co-operate.

Against Euro-sceptic Unionism, for example:

"Indeed it is perverse that, even though Euro-sceptics generally claim to be strong for the Union, their impact, if anything, undermines it, by obstructing participation in the single currency, which is strongly needed for economic reasons by the more peripheral parts of the UK." Without mentioning MacDiarmid's unfailing bete noire, England, Mr Ahern could hardly have put things more clearly : a pro-European peripheral alliance - with London if possible, but without it if necessary. Three months later, the Isle of Man government held a debate on the pros and cons of outright independence (so far unresolved). Shortly after that the Welsh Parliament was inaugurated, with limited powers but correspondingly greater expectations.

A Northern Ireland administration has had to wait longer, but the likelihood of it coming into existence remains strong. Baal's children are emerging from the old great-power shadows, in short, with no assistance from either Communism or Celtic Grandeur unearthed.

I know the old boy would have fulminated about more "bourgeois governments", and regarded Holyrood as a hokum parliament.

But he was speaking from an Empire's edge, in a politically inert Scotland beset by the ghouls of blood-line nationalism. High-decibel Sovereignty was the rule (and there's still plenty of it about in the darker corners of Westminster). One had to bellow abstractions in order to get heard, and claim they were all heroic songs, like the Serbian Epics which have reappeared in Bosnia over the last decade. MacDiarmid's non-public persona was always quite different. I suspect he would actually have felt gleefully at home amid the quieter intrigues of Dewar, Salmond and President Mary McAleese.

The latter's visit to Aberdeen is for the opening of a Research Institute concerned with Irish and Scottish issues. This is an important academic initiative, but also has a wider importance for both politics and civil society. As well as the matters signalled by Premier Ahern, there is an extensive agenda of historical and cultural questions waiting to be tackled.

How significant this is was shown last year by the publication of William Ferguson's remarkable study The Identity of the Scottish Nation. Ferguson argued that the crucial thing here was the incredible efforts made throughout Imperial times to persuade the Scots that they were in no way Irish by descent or cultural disposition. No, by God: they had to be made of sterner, Teutonic stuff, proof against idolatry, slavishness and slack emotionalism.

From the moment of Ossian onwards, the unfortunate Picts were mobilised in retrospect to that end. Since practically nothing was (or is) known about them, they could easily be depicted as Prussian-style battlers, most probably brisk and Protestant in demeanour.

The converse of this was, of course, the "threat" posed by the new Irish immigration into the Scottish industrial belt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the 1930s, while MacDiarmid was churning out his Heroic Song, the Presbyterian Church was for a time converted to the lunatic notion of sending them all home. There are still dregs of it about, but not much more. The leader of the "No" campaign in the 1997 referendum, Tory lawyer Donald Findlay Q.C., was subsequently exposed as an Orangeist bigot, and it ruined him. There is no sympathy whatever in Scotland's reborn polity for a return to such customs.

Under E.U. rules there is of course no way preventing citizens from settling where they wish. But my own view is that any way-out Belfast Protestants who may be thinking of ideological re-entry to the old homeland should study Mr Findlay's fate, think again - and stay right where they are.

Scottish author and journalist Tom Nairn, is a Fellow of the Dicuil Foundation (Benbecula). He lives in County Roscommon. His book After Britain will be published in January.