Louise Duffy | Staff Writer
Scottish and Irish academics gathered at Trinity’s Long Room Hub yesterday to discuss the possible implications of the Scottish Referendum results on both sides of the Irish Sea.
The conference, entitled ‘Scotland’s Past and Futures/Exploring the Bigger Picture’ was organised by Trinity’s Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies, with support from the Royal Irish Academy.
A shock poll published by The Sunday Times this weekend put the Yes vote ahead for the first time in the campaign so far; as such the conference addressed the deep reverberations an independent Scotland would have on the North.
Speakers at yesterday’s conference included Scottish and Irish history and politics academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee and UCD, as well as Trinity.
The two panel discussions were chaired by Trinity’s Professor Aileen Douglas and former Irish Times Foreign Policy editor Paul Gillespie.
It was however Professor Graham Walker of Queen’s University, Belfast whose contribution proved perhaps the most memorable and pertinent.
Professor Walker argued that the presence of Scotland in the UK is central to the logic of where the North fits into the Union.
Over the past number of years, the six counties have been admitted increasingly into the reform agenda for the UK as a whole, but this is now in danger.
“The conclusion seems obvious that if Scotland departs the UK, the UK’s devolutionary, Union State project faces oblivion,” he said.
He gave bleak predictions for the North’s place in the Union following a “Yes” vote on September 18, warning that, “Northern Ireland will again be regarded just as a troublesome and marginal place apart. Any hopes for the eventual triumph of civic unionism in Northern Ireland will be dealt a hammer blow.”
This would lead unionists, the academic continued, “to have to re-examine and re-imagine their Unionist beliefs.”
On the other hand former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was quoted as saying recently that the unitary state idea of the UK is gone for good, and that the prospect following “No” would still be of a looser Union, perhaps a federal UK.
This would mean, according to Professor Walker, that the North would have to prove itself willing and able to handle significant additional powers and responsibilities.
He added that “this will mean making government work dynamically in Stormont rather than the minimalism and failure to tackle key issues that characterises the executive at present.”
His timely comments preceded Stormont’s First Minister Peter Robinson; the leader of the DUP’s dire assessment of the North’s political system as “time consuming and sluggish,” in an interview in today’s Belfast Telegraph.
