Ireland has a beguiling habit of gently posing some difficult questions for Scotland and for the rest of Britain. Not in any direct or threatening way, but simply by virtue of comparison.
Earlier this month I had the pleasure to listen to the Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Harney, speak at a dinner hosted by the Scottish Chambers of Commerce. She welcomed the chance to deepen relations between two small nations with a lot in common.
At the same time, in a gentle, subtle style she drew implicit comparisons between the two countries, and between image and reality. She contrasted, for example, the picture of a gender-balanced, modern parliament which Scottish Finance Minister, Jack McConnell, had been describing to her, with the noticeable lack of gender balance on the top table.
She also talked about the very positive and deliberate steps that the Irish Government took some years ago to turn the economy around, starting with the construction of a firm social partnership model and heavy investment in education.
The Celtic Tiger miracle is no miracle: it was built on hard work, and genuinely tough choices. Ireland faced up to those choices because it could not afford not to. She left an unspoken question floating in the ether: when will Scotland face those choices, and would we too opt for a boom which has the Irish creating 2,000 jobs and 1,000 homes a week?
A further set of challenging questions arise in considering devolution, constitutional reform and Britain's relations with Europe. One of the best analyses of British schizophrenia over Europe was produced in Dublin three years ago.
It concluded that, since Britain was in the process of redesigning itself through a programme of constitutional change, we would not be able to take any sensible decisions about our wider role in the world until that process was complete. And so it has come to pass: we are busy determining which 100 hereditary peers should sit in a "halfway House of Lords" while the countries of the euro zone - Ireland amongst them - are busy building a new European order.
It does not make sense. I have lost count of the number of times people from outside Britain, when hearing that I live and work in Scotland, ask me the same simple question about the constitutional change programme: "What is the overall plan?" That is often followed by a sharp supplementary: "So why is Tony Blair doing it?" Neither question has become any easier to answer over the 21/2 years of the Blair government.
From time to time it has been possible to discern a plan: a root and branch incremental overhaul of each element of the constitution which in the end would reveal a thoroughly modern, balanced, democratic, devolved state. And it has been possible to argue that Blair embarked on this process because he is a democrat, a moderniser, and because there is strong political demand for these changes. Against that there has always been the thought that, as David Marquand has put it, the whole constitutional reform programme is in fact "the muddled, messy work of practical men and women, unintellectual when not positively anti-intellectual. . ." a revolution of sleepwalkers who don't know quite where they are going or quite why".
It is difficult to discern the plan, he argues, because there is none - other than the political need to respond to forces pressing for change. And now, 21/2 years on, that pressing need seems to be receding. Scottish devolution could be sold on the strength of an intuitively persuasive argument for democratic self-determination. Abolishing the hereditary peers could be reduced to a convincing soundbite about ancient adultery and accident of birth being no qualification for high office in a democratic parliament.
BUT where can our political leaders find their constitutional soundbites now? We are entering the difficult, non-sexy, non-obvious realms of constitutional reform: freedom of information, reform of the Lords stage two, building popular support for English region al government, waiting and seeing whether Gordon Brown's economic tests are passed permitting the campaign for the euro to begin in earnest, waiting and seeing whether and when Tony Blair will take the Jenkins report on electoral reform for Westminster off the back burner (and whether a collapse in the coalition in Scotland - which I do not think likely - brings down the wider coalition for British electoral reform with it). Perhaps the next wave of political energy for constitutional change will actually come in local government. That may sound surprising in Scotland where the McIntosh report has not so far translated into obvious action and the key to the castle - electoral reform - has been remitted to another commission.
But in England the government has promised legislation in this session to permit cities to opt for elected mayors. That really could shake things up - and, incidentally, take some of the steam out of the campaign for regional government in some parts of the country.
What effect might it have in Scotland when, say, the mayor of Newcastle gives her or his area a new and powerful voice? What will Glasgow say? Look at the interest in the elections for the London mayor: we are witnessing a significant injection of fresh energy into the constitutional debate and a new focus on the local level.
Perhaps that is significant - beginning to recognise that one way of dealing with the challenges of the modern world is to build on the strength of a common local identity. We stand a much better chance of developing a coherent, strategic approach to change, and the broad support of society to bear the pains of transition, when economic, social and political vision and leadership come together in a single space. That is one lesson from Ireland which Scotland and its parliament now have the chance to learn from.
Paul Gillespie ed. Britain's European Question: the issues for Ireland, Institute of European Affairs, 1996
Graham Leicester is director of the Scottish Council Foundation
