Seamus Deane - Keough Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame
"The emergence of new fields of inquiry is sometimes an anticipation, sometimes a consequence of profound political and economic change. It is obvious that Ireland and Scotland are undergoing a series of changes that will transform both in ways that are impossible to predict but necessary to imagine.
"Irish and Scottish studies are not simply cross-disciplinary arenas. They are relatively new ways of reorganising knowledge. The long history that connects and separates the two countries enables them to form an exemplary cultural alliance that will led to their mutual enrichment and self-understanding."
Roy Foster - Carroll Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford
"Studying Irish and Scottish history together has proved to be both brilliantly illuminating and intellectually invigorating: contrasts and parallels in past and present have been explored by the work of historians such as Louis Cullen, Graham Walker, Owen Dudley Edwards, David Stevenson and Tom Devine, now director of the new Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
"Institutionalising this link at the highest academic level seems a very fitting way to inaugurate a new millennium of scholarly growth and exchange between two countries whose historical relationship has been closely intertwined for at least a thousand years, and all of us involved in promoting the study of Irish history in Britain must warmly welcome it."
T C Smout - Historiographer Royal in Scotland, St Andrews University
"In the past Ireland and Scotland have been best known to the outside world for the extraordinary numbers of emigrants who now represent a talented Diaspora of many millions across the globe. Fifty years ago this ended, but the great emigration left both nations with a tradition of moving easily in other cultures.
"The challenge of the 21st century will be how to maintain this tradition. In Ireland, it will obviously be how to extend the toleration of other cultures internally, in the north. In both countries it will be how to operate a world where the sovereignty of nation-states is compromised by globalisation and modern political alliances such as the European Union.
"Questions of `national independence' will become secondary to questions of maintaining democratic freedom, a proper sense of distinctiveness, prosperity and genuine social harmony in our societies. A culture of flexibility, internationalism and toleration is what we have in varying degrees inherited, and what we must seek to preserve and extend in the next century.
Seamas O Cathain - Professor, Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin
"Ireland and Scotland are outstanding among the countries of western Europe in terms of a vibrant folk tradition in song, music, story and local customs. The documented record of tradition materials in both countries constitutes a resource for the study of folklore which is second to none. The tradition archives and related collections in the two countries are a lodestone drawing scholars, students, writers and researchers as well as ordinary people from every walk of life.
Through them - against the background of the living tradition - visitors can gain a deeper understanding of tangible and intangible elements of one of the world's richest and best documented folk cultural heritages.