There are many Scotlands, including the Irish one - and many Irelands including the Scottish one. This diversity and commonality have been hidden by the tangled history of these two islands which so concentrated until recently on the Dublin-London, Belfast-London and the Edinburgh/ Glasgow-London axes.
That is changing fast as we make the transition from Anglo-Irish to British-Irish relations symbolised by the Belfast Agreement and devolved government in Scotland. Within the new relationship Scotland and Ireland are converging and getting to know one another better again.
President McAleese's official visit to Scotland is an important affirmation of these changing political and constitutional realities, as was that of the Scottish First Minister, Mr Donald Dewar, to Dublin one month ago. Today she inaugurates the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, dedicated to studying the history, language, literature and culture of the two countries.
In an interview here she emphasises how restrictive the "Anglo axis" was for Scottish-Irish relations. This supplement marks the occasion by exploring the many links between them. It includes contributions from the major political players and academics involved and reports on contemporary political, economic and cultural exchanges. The Irish Times and The Scotsman have co-operated to publish it concurrently in both newspapers.
Comparison is to the human sciences what experimentation is to the natural ones. Scotland and Ireland form an admirable pairing to investigate these converging and diverging paths of development over two millennia. This point is made powerfully and convincingly by Professor Tom Devine, Director of the Aberdeen institute, in an essay for this supplement.
Historical investigation of changing political and state identities contains the key to understanding relations between the two countries. But it is always as well to bear in mind that commonalities persisted even during periods when real or ideological divergence appeared to be most complete.
It was the Irish tribes, the Scoti (themselves probably descended from the first prehistoric settlers in Ireland who crossed the 13 mile North Channel from east to west) who invaded the Western Highlands and gave their name to the sea-defined Dal Riada kingdom in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Their common Gaelic language has been a cultural bond ever since. St Columba's role in Christianising Scotland is one of the best-known contacts between them.
Thereafter for a thousand years there was close interaction across the sea and common influence from outside, whether from Vikings or Anglo-Normans - although Scotland was much more subject to migration from northern and western England and as a result became a more heterogeneous society than the island of Ireland.
This ethnic kindred was so taken for granted that in the early fourteenth century Robert Bruce, the great Scottish hero, could write to the kings, prelates and inhabitants of Ireland appealing for an alliance "so that with God's will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty" against Anglo-Norman encroachment. Sean Duffy, a medieval historian in Trinity College Dublin, points out in the Autumn 1999 issue of History Ireland devoted to Irish-Scottish relations that Robert Bruce's principal Scottish biographer, Geoffrey Barrow, initially assumed the reference to "our nation" was a scribal error and should have read "your nation". If that was so Robert's decision to send his brother Edward Bruce on an invasion of Ireland not long after his great victory at Bannockburn was incomprehensible - and received very scant treatment in that book, published in 1965.
Duffy says this is not a criticism of Barrow's historical work but rather that he was a man of his time. It is important to be reminded that historians as well as journalists suffer from that malaise, which can profoundly alter how the past is viewed in any particular generation. The Scottish-Irish relationship is a particularly appropriate example of the phenomenon. In a recent review in this newspaper of Professor Devine's fine study, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000, Ireland's new Consul General in Edinburgh, Daniel Mulhall, wrote that "for many Irish readers, I suspect, our closest Celtic neighbour disappears from the radar screen sometime in the 17th century".
The Reformation imposed a great barrier between Presbyterian Scotland and Catholic Ireland, reinforced by the 17th century colonisation of the northern part of Ireland by 100,000 Protestant Scots. So did the regal union of Scotland and England under James VI and I in 1607 and the parliamentary one in 1707.
Scotland, unlike Ireland, was incorporated in Great Britain as a junior partner in empire, retaining its distinctive religious, legal and educational institutions in what became a union rather than a unitary state. "By contrast", Devine writes, "Ireland was conquered, colonised and the mass of its people subjugated by penal legislation". The new Scottish settlers became part of an ethnic frontier directed against Gaelic and Catholic Ireland.
And further: "There was a sustained intellectual assault on the ancient bond forged over hundreds of years between the two nations. The Scottish literati of the Enlightenment saw the Irishness of Scotland as redolent of its primitive, archaic and barbarous past - something not only to be denied but actually erased from the historical record in the new age of progress, improvement and fruitful political alignment with England".
It has taken another sustained intellectual assault on the distortions laid down in that period by historians in recent years to uncover the links detailed in this supplement. Changing times, circumstances and interests stimulate this renewed investigation, which goes far beyond historical research but is justifiably related to it. "Could it be," asks Duffy, "that as Scots have gone in pursuit of their Scottishness, their search has brought them to Ireland. . ?"
