Antrim is a confusing place. Nowhere else in Ireland is richer in Gaelic mythology and legend yet no place on the island has been more subject to Scottish influence. The thread that connects Ireland and Scotland is the trading across the modest stretch of sea between Argyll and the Ulster coast.

The Giant's Causeway basalt blocks ought to be a submerged passage if myths were true but the rock does invest the two whisk(e)ys with a common feature - or rather the basalt tinctured peat does.

The extraordinary thing about whisky is that in one sense it is all the same superficially yet experience it closely and there is a huge spectrum. The inexplicable alchemy of the distilling can produce subtle but tangible changes in different batches from the same stills. Scottish and Irish whisky ought to be much the same but they remain discernably different.

Of the 114 distilleries operating at the end of the Napoleonic wars only five shipped any whisky to England. Whisky, or if you are Irish, whiskey, was a secret kept by the Scots and the Irish. It was almost unknown to the rest of the world. This started to change in the 1830s with the invention of the patent still by Robert Stein of Kincardine on Forth. From his innovation whisky started to conquer the world.

One of his daughters married a John Haig and he started the Markinch Distillery in Fife. Another married John Jameson who took her and her father's device to Dublin and founded Jameson & Co.

We would not have the whisky industry of Ireland and Scotland but for Stein's patent which produced alcohol in one continuous operation as opposed to the more laborious two distillations of the traditional pot-still.

The next improvement was Aeneas Coffey's which allowed the distilling of grain and eventually the blending of the two. His Dublin innovations lifted whisky from little more than a successful cottage industry into a full-scale commercial product. Irishman Coffey ought to be a hero in the Scotch whisky story but he usually only features as a footnote.

Scotland and Ireland jostled for the leadership as they have for more than a thousand years. It seems Scotland became predominant through salesmanship. They rode the odd tide of fashionability devised in the mind of Sir Walter Scott and animated by Queen Victoria, to make all things tartan romantic, ancient and noble.

By poetry these qualities were invested in Scottish Whisky while Ireland never linked its powerful myths to distilling. If only some of the Irish cycle heroes from mythology had been known to tipple, the history of Ireland's whiskeys would have been utterly different. There is no handicap in the merits of their water or peat or grain.

MEAD and other brews derived from honey were the first comforting drinks to be traded between Scotland and Ireland but that strange invasion of Argyll in the Dark Ages by Ulstermen seems to have seeded knowledge of pot-still skills. The whisky trade should underwrite more detailed archaeological examination of the sites where organic remnants of long-lost distilling probably survive.

Knowledge of whisky eluded the Romans. Is it that it did not exist then? We inherit only fragmentary glimpses into what they thought of the Celtic ruffians they partially conquered - and they often refer to them as drunken. There is no reference to any special native concoction.

You can make a drink out of anything that is plant or flesh. I know a couple in Tayside, Scottish and Irish, who found their especially successful annual elderflower wine was explained by the fermenting rat that had got into their barrel inadvertently. It seems to me that fermentation would have been applied to any items harvested and preserved in the long, dark winter. Sugar was needed - which, before cane or beet, meant honey and the learning of yeast skills refined what must otherwise have been grim but warming.

We only have any tangible proof real whisky is present when the authorities start to tax it. 1644 is the first reference to a levy by the Scots Parliament, it was 2 shillings 8 pence per Scots pint, about 7 pennies per gallon.

I have found no reference to the Irish authorities, prior to Union in 1801, imposing a tax on stills but there must have been taxation as there was smuggling. No fun being a smuggler if your contraband ain't taxed. The channel between Antrim and Kintyre is not too far for an oarsman to row in a day or rather less with a fair wind, Tory Island north of the Irish coast means "bandit" in Gaelic.

It seems to have been a smuggling centre matched by the tip of land south of Campbeltown. Smuggling Irish drink north and east alternated with smuggling Scottish whisky south and west depending on the taxes being levied or, more exactly, the diligence of the excisemen.

There are two immortals amongst the taxmen who monitored the Irish/Scottish whiskey trade - Robert Burns and Adam Smith. Burns penned many forlorn references to his unhappy task to be the opponent of free, or at least tax-free, drink. Smith was a more sober commentator but insightful: "Were the duties and excises upon malt and whisky to be taken away all at once, a pretty general and temporary drunkeness among the middling and inferior ranks of people would probably be soon followed by a permanent and almost universal sobriety." Nothing like an economist to write nonsense.

Of course there is rivalry and champions salute different flavours, but apart from the Scots distilling their grains slightly less thoroughly, whisky and whiskey are much the same to all but the experts.

Because the Irish distill three times they tend to have a higher alcohol score, though some Lowland Scottish distilleries have now adopted the Irish technique.

The Irish make a claim St Patrick brought the magic of distilling to Ireland but then Scots legends attribute the same happy innovation to St Columba. It is probably baloney but these Dark Age divines were able administrators and did bring in many new ideas. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Celtic Church ever positioned themselves in the tee-total lobby.

There is a story - it must be false - that St Patrick argued the miracle at the marriage in Cana where Jesus achieved whisky rather than merely fortified wine. It would make a memorable, if blasphemous, brand name.

While Irish and Scots distillers are subject to different tax regimes - company taxes as much as retail duties there is always an arbitrage potential opening and closing. The authorities in Brussels are determined to flatten these differences to create a market where all imposts are uniform and even the currencies are identical. This will cleanse the Irish-Scottish whisky trade. In future, the exchanges across the Irish Sea will all be about taste or flavour and nothing to do with relative costs.

The great project for the next generation is to convert the rest of the world to enjoying whisky. Both nations need to polish their credentials as customers in Buenos Aires, Sydney or Tokyo think they are buying a taste of Celtic mist and myth.

Legends need to have more magic than fiscal propriety. Paradoxically whisky will seem more compelling the more it can rehearse its past. Those archaeologists will have to get digging.