Irish-Scottish Studies: In John Bull's Other Ireland, Broadbent, the unobservant Englishman, thinks that the conniving Tim Haffigan is 100 per cent Irish. Larry Doyle tells him that Haffigan was born in Scotland, and a stage direction describes Haffigan's brogue as "decaying into a would-be genteel accent with an unexpected strain of Glasgow".
Yet Ireland and Scotland have not only been victims of English myopia and power. There has also been mutual myopia. Scotland, visible from the north-east Ulster coast, is often invisible farther south. Awareness of Scotland receded from modern Irish intellectual life insofar as that was shaped by self- distancing from the UK. Symptomatically, "England", seen as Ireland's Other, effaces Britain in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland.
Nonetheless, Irish-Scottish studies have gradually entered the academic foreground. For Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan, editors of Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700-2000, they are an idea, an inter-national and inter-disciplinary project, whose time has come. This important collection of essays also contains an upbeat afterword by the historian Tom Devine, founder of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen University, and a foundational thinker more generally. Devine relates the development of Irish-Scottish studies to "a general trend in the humanities towards the non-anglocentric analysis of the cultures, histories and languages" of our islands. And he argues that the comparative method has a special ability to disturb entrenched academic paradigms: "There is always a danger of introspection, parochialism and navel-gazing in single-country studies".
But why should Irish or Scottish studies abandon such pleasurable habits? And is there a political as well as academic agenda at work? McIlvanney and Ryan admit: "To advocate an Irish/Scottish context is to establish a political - and in some eyes a polemical - framework for debate. Within Irish studies, the Irish/Scottish comparison is viewed by some as unionism's answer to post-colonial studies." In literary if not historical studies, Third World parallels tend to be sexier than, say, the connections traced by Graham Walker's and Alan Bairner's survey of politics, sport and sectarianism. This essay ranges from the cultural power of the GAA to the ramifications of Old Firm soccer rivalry - recently again a cause of rioting in Belfast. Perhaps the point is (or should be) that all comparative findings are themselves open to comparison.
Nonetheless, Scotland's continuing position inside the UK, together with what has been called Scottish "unionist nationalism", makes certain comparisons awkward for those who prefer to locate Irish experience outside archipelagic and even European contexts. This is usually not the perspective here, as when Jim Smyth's overview of pro-union rhetoric in both countries sees the unions as "in the first instance, wartime emergency measures"; or when John Kerrigan, writing on drama linked with 17th-century Derry, discovers a fascinating cat's cradle of Gaelic, English and Scots idioms, and of Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian entanglement in "archipelagic events".
In fact, the millennia of traffic across the North Channel are as liable to disturb unionist as nationalist preconceptions. Scottish Presbyterian immigration to Ulster counts for less in Scottish life than Irish Catholic immigration to the west of Scotland, now typified by Tom Devine rather than Tim Haffigan. Again, Irish-Scottish studies effectively began as Gaelic/Celtic studies. And if they have gained an impetus from the peace process and British-Irish rapprochement, Ulster unionists do not necessarily like these trends or welcome devolved Scotland's attraction to the Celtic Tiger.
In particular, the Ulster Scots lobby will hardly like McIlvanney's excellent essay on "The language, literature and politics of Ulster Scots". McIlvanney refers to "a tongue with few speakers . . . being vigorously promoted in a flurry of mission statements [and] colonising public discourse with a slew of obsolete terms and extravagant neologisms". Scots dialect and Scottish culture are being appropriated for Ulster unionist tribal ideology without regard to contemporary Scotland, let alone the protests of linguists. My own neologism for the allegedly Ulster Scots musical On Eagle's Wing is "kiltsch".
Yet McIlvanney does not throw out the bairn with the bath water. While criticising travesties of a genuine heritage, he complicates the literary and cultural map: "The Ulster-Scots canon provides a corrective to the more glibly totalising views of Irish and Scottish writing . . . it also suggests intriguing new approaches to specific texts and authors". Among such authors McIlvanney includes Seamus Heaney, whose poetry "demonstrates that Ulster's Scottish inheritance - in its Gaelic, Lallans and English modes - is available to the Catholic as to the Protestant writer". He also shows that Robert Burns was as "inescapable" for Patrick Kavanagh as for John Hewitt.
On a wider front, Cairns Craig uses the impact of MacPherson's Ossian to argue that "the struggle over identity within each country" should not obscure "a much more complex process of identity-formation in cultural exchange between nations". He notes that Edinburgh's New Town and the idea of a Scottish capital were inspired by Dublin. In literature too there has been a kind of revival roundabout, with Yeats envying Edinburgh, Hugh MacDiarmid emulating the Irish literary movement, and contemporary Northern Irish poetry influencing Scottish poets. If "English literature" also plays a part in these dynamics, these dynamics make "English literature" look different. Writing on Victorian images of Britishness, Fiona Stafford contrasts Palgrave's nationally minded Golden Treasury with a pioneering archipelagic anthology edited by Donegal-born William Allingham.
The English academy has often asset-stripped Irish and Scottish literature to fabricate an integrated tradition. Yet "glibly totalising" canons of these literatures are also to blame when they distance writers with Anglo- in their cultural bearings. The national paradigm, updated into postcolonial language, remains powerful in Irish literary and cultural studies, although less so in other fields. But it leaves too much data homeless. Nor does it adequately interpret the nation itself - as is proved by one or two essays here which recycle tired Irish or Scottish academic tropes without putting them to a mutual test. To track cultural exchange is to highlight distinctiveness as well as connection. A key area, broached by Cairns Craig, is the question of distinctive styles in the academy itself, and the forces that condition them. At very least, Irish-Scottish studies can make us more aware of our own biases.
Edna Longley is a writer and critic
Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society 1700-2000 Edited by Liam McIlvanney & Ray Ryan Four Courts Press, 284 pp. €55