Irish politicians need to respond to issues that Scottish referendum raises

It would be gratifying if a senior Irish politician would make an intelligent contribution to the Scottish independence debate. It is far too convenient for Irish politicians to hide behind a vow of silence and insist it would be inappropriate for them to interfere with the internal affairs of the United Kingdom.

They should respond to the issues the referendum raises, not just because of its implications for Ireland but because the Republic’s experience has frequently been cited by both Scottish sides, either to highlight what are presented as the dangers of independence (isolation, economic difficulties) or its benefits (cultural distinctiveness, continued link to sterling, national pride, free from an overpowering larger neighbour).

There has been no shortage of cartoon history framed by the Yes side. In May in the Financial Times, Kevin Toolis, under the headline "Scots should recall the poverty of the Irish Free State", insisted Scots should vote against independence because the Free State created in 1922 was "a parochial disaster", and "millions of Irish were forced to flee."

He continued: “The Irish Free State did not make the Irish people free. It bound them in chains . . . in all but name Ireland remained an economic vassal of the UK treasury . . . Irish prime ministers such as Charles Haughey almost openly looted the state’s treasuries . . . it has taken nearly a century for Ireland to recover and for a real democracy to emerge.”

Wilful ignorance

Context, perspective and reality are thrown out the window with this kind of bilious, and deliberately selective rant. This is not to deny that economic failures and corruption were serious Irish problems, but there is wilful ignorance at play in Toolis’s analysis, with no mention of the reasons Irish nationalists desired and fought for independence, or that the Free State was a creditor nation in the 1920s, or that it achieved political stability and implemented an independent foreign policy in its infant decades at a time when much of Europe was in turmoil and abandoned democracy.

In time, the Republic was able to use its independence to lessen dependence on Britain and join the EEC.

But nationalism is not defined by bread or currency alone, and successive Irish governments from the 1940s also successfully battled to establish an Irish citizenship that was not just a variant of the status of British subject.

The inheritors of that citizenship should have plenty to say about state-building challenges. Scotland also has manifest advantages that the Free State did not, including a more robust and diversified economy, rich national resources, the absence of violence and an advanced welfare state.

The panic emanating from the English political elite this week in reaction to recent opinion polls took them from arrogant complacency towards hysteria. They have only themselves to blame: there has been too much negative campaigning, bullying, scare tactics and a refusal to acknowledge more sophisticated definitions of nationalism than their own or the inadequacy of their definition of equality.

When he was British prime minister in 1998 Tony Blair was sufficiently smug and naive to inscribe a copy of the Scotland Act to Donald Dewar, soon to be Scottish first minister: “It was a struggle; it may always be hard, but it was worth it. Scotland and England together on equal terms.”

Poverty of understanding

The insistence that Scottish devolution amounts to equality with England highlighted the poverty of understanding of nationalism, which was also, nearly 100 years ago, partly responsible for the inadequacy of the British approach to the Irish question, another theme about which there is no reason for the inheritors of the independent Irish State to remain silent.

Two years after his scribble from Blair, Dewar was in Dublin for a speech where he, like Blair, underlined what has remained the patronising and counterproductive characterisation of Scottish nationalism: “It has never been a credible strategy for the Scots to turn inwards . . . nationalists may on occasion gather strength on the basis of a protest vote. They are the available option for the discontented . . . Devolution puts what is best managed in Scotland. It leaves what is best done at the UK level at the UK level.”

Devo max

If the proponents of Scottish devolution as its exists believe it amounts to equal status, why then are some of them now suggesting the solution to Scottish independent aspirations is the so-called “devo max”, an enhanced devolution?

As has been pointed out by Scotland’s leading historian, Tom Devine, such a development would merely prolong a running sore: experience suggests, he argues, that it is only through sovereignty that Scotland and England can “develop a truly amicable and equal relationship”.

It is surely worth noting regarding such an assertion that Ireland would unlikely have developed the good relationship it now has with England without gaining such sovereignty.

While the No side is likely to narrowly win next week’s referendum, the independence debate is not going away and there should be a considered and informed Irish contribution to that debate.