Scots story of high interest to Irish

"You chaps gave Ireland home rule in 1886, and look what happened." So said Ian Lang, then secretary of state for Scotland, in response to a Scottish Liberal in 1992. His remark is quoted by Christopher Harvie, in the third edition of his brilliant book, Scot- land and Nationalism.

It is worth recalling in a week that saw Tony Blair make an unprecedented address to the Oireachtas, calling on all concerned to go beyond nationalist and unionist nostrums and for Ireland and Britain to co-operate closely within the European Union. Britain's rulers have never lost the habit of looking at Ireland as a whole; it is worth repaying the compliment from this country.

That Mr Blair's message is part of a wider concern about the United Kingdom's future becomes quite clear when examined from the perspective of Scotland. Labour's rhetoric there is concerned with preserving the union and combating nationalism, not transcending them, as a recent briefing visit made plain.

An important speech by Mr Blair in Edinburgh earlier this month was more utilitarian than affective, dwelling on how England needs Scotland to preserve the UK's global influence and role. No sign there of Peter Brooke's waiver of a selfish strategic interest.

But such rhetoric more often than not rubs Scots up the wrong way. Labour's recent heavily co-ordinated barrage of propaganda against independence can serve to reinforce its appeal, whether it concerns warnings over budgetary balances and cross-subsidies from Westminster to Scotland or disputing Mr Dewar's right to set limits on political discussion of independence (Cardinal Winning said in Brussels that Scotland is more a nation than Catalonia or Bavaria).

There are many tripwires here for a Labour Party widely perceived to be led by a centralising elite in London obsessed with controlling dissidence. In the land whose social and economic theorists invented the notion of unanticipated consequences of actions during the Scottish enlightenment this should not surprise, but it surely does. It makes the Scottish story highly relevant to Irish people, not least because of the role this country and this State, not to mention this nation, increasingly occupy in their debate.

Were Scotland indeed to go independent, as a majority of its voters say they want (in admittedly ambiguous opinion polls) the consequences for Ireland would be huge. What would become of unionist identification with and loyalty to Britain, decidedly not the same as England? This rather than the unionist concessions to Sinn Fein, highlighted recently by Conor Cruise O'Brien, could provoke unionism to do a deal on a federal Ireland with Dublin much sooner than Dublin anticipates, wants or can afford.

Mr Lang's "cocktail of dogma and dimness", Harvie writes, "stood in ominous contrast to the subtlety of the Balfour brothers and George Wyndham in fin-de- siecle Ireland".

They tried to kill home rule with kindness, through land reform and regional development, a strategy which worked for nearly a generation and then mitigated the social content of the separatist revolution that actually occurred in Ireland after the first World War.

Their efforts were followed by an intense discussion of "home rule all round", in which the post-Gladstonian Liberals tried to find a coherent formula for federalising the UK. The period fascinates Mr Blair and is full of contemporary echoes. Then, as now, two central objections were raised: that home rule threatened the unitary British state and its overseas interests; and that it raised the English question whose identity is embedded so ambiguously in the British one.

Separatism and partition in Ireland put the British constitutional question off its political agenda in the 1920s; the next 50 years were concerned rather with the class distribution of income and welfare, war and the management of imperial decline. But events in the 1970s and 1980s decisively revived the constitutional question. According to Tom Nairn, one of the most acute Scottish writers on these themes, Mrs Thatcher set out to restore British grandeur, but she ended up breaking the back of British identity.

Inescapably, the dynamics set in train by Scotland's devolution raise the question of the future of the United Kingdom as a whole. Optimists expect a quasi-federalising process in coming years, which could also embed the discourse of European integration as a virtuous objective.

"This is a process not an event", said a prominent Scottish Nationalist, explaining how his party proposes to test the limits of devolution by exploiting neuralgic points between Edinburgh and London once the new assembly is up and running after the elections next May 6th. Education, fishing, broadcasting, environmental, agricultural and transport policies are seen in this way.