Introducing two very intimate strangers

When I arrived for interview for a job in the University of Aberdeen over thirty years ago, I knew so little of Scotland that I was startled, as the evening plane banked for descent, to look out the window and find no sunset above the North Sea.

I was even more startled on my return from my first visit to Pittodrie Stadium, where I had just watched the Dons walloped by Jock Stein's about-to-be European champions Celtic, to be asked by a local, "Fit like the fitba?" I gazed at him with a wild surmise, and replied: "It's ten past five".

In those first weeks here, I could not believe that a city as big as Aberdeen had no slums, but that was before I realised that grey granite, unlike red brick, hides a multitude of sins.

I found the people laconic and overly polite. Indeed, the only thing that reminded me of Northern Ireland were the desperately grim Sundays, when the only things not locked up were the swings. But that was before the oil came.

If geography and language were initial problems, it also took me quite a while to appreciate the degree of cultural diversity in Scotland, from the Orkney of George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir, to the West of Scotland of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, from the Gaelic world of the islands of Iain Crichton Smith and Sorley MacLean to the north-east of Grassic Gibbon, to the Edinburgh of Scott and Muriel Spark. This variety was comforting to the Irishman contemplating the different imaginative constituencies of his own society, and hearing in Scottish culture a polyphony of different voices rather than discordant clashes.

When I arrived here, I knew something of the great Scottish literary tradition, because at Queen's University Belfast, where I had been an undergraduate, we had had several Scottish lecturers, and the syllabus included Henryson and Dunbar and the ballads; we read Ramsay and Fergusson and Burns; we read Scott and Hogg and Stevenson; we read MacDiarmid and Muir and MacCaig.

However, all this literature was presented in a decontextualised way. All I really knew of Scottish history was that it had been described as "theology interrupted by homicide", and that that struck me as also a good description of Irish history.

I knew that Scotland had done rather better out of Empire than we Irish had. And I knew about Black Bob the sheepdog, the Clyde, and Celtic and Rangers (the last because this was Northern Ireland prosecuting its wars by different means). That I had so much to learn about Scotland is surprising, because there are so many similarities between Ireland and Scotland. Yet the countries are strangers, if intimate strangers. In an attempt to redress this situation, Aberdeen's departments of English, History, and Celtic are involved with their colleagues in Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and Strathclyde, in a collaborative research endeavour and in a staff and student mobility programme. There is an enormous and relatively under-explored field of comparative study to be undertaken. Both countries, both cultures, share interests, share historical and sociological patterns and paradigms.

One need only mention a set of common areas of mutual interest: immigration and emigration, diaspora, religion, famine and clearance, minority identity, nationalism, attitudes to Europe, linguistic configurations and complexities.

We Irish need to know more about the Scottish democratic intellect and about the robust intellectuality of the Scottish theological tradition; Scots may be able to learn from our melancholy story more about the cul-de-sac of romantic nationalism and about the waste of energy in programmatic anti-Englishness. For there is of course, in all this rich field of comparative study, a shared history of problems of varying degrees of difficulty with the Awkward Neighbour, England.

The mention of England brings into focus the new openings potentiated by a devolved Scotland. I recall Samuel Beckett's famous exchange with his interviewer who asked him: "Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?" To which Beckett replied: "Au contraire".

The laconic joke comments on the ways in which Irish identity had been constructed for too long in mere opposition to all things English. This leads to a disabling provincialism, which Patrick Kavanagh defined as the smaller country's continuous and continual measuring of itself against the metropolitan centre. Only that centre, it was felt, could give meaningful approval and validation of the provincial country's cultural efforts.

Kavanagh's antidote to this enfeebling provincialism was what he called "parochialism", at first sight an illogical retreat into something even further up the backside of nowhere.

However, what he meant by parochialism was a trust in the local, a self-confidence that needs no approval from the imperial capital or from any outside metropolis, the abolition of the cultural cringe. I believe that in cultural terms devolution will reinforce Scottish self-confidence and self-belief, and that the signs are already before us in the very remarkable efflorescence of Scottish writing. The time is ripe for Scotland and Ireland to get to know each other better.