Is Scottish Independence in Irish interests?

The Green Ribbon gets visits from Irish, English and Scottish nationalists, so I thought it might be worth highlighting a passage from Ronnan Fanning’s contribution to Renovation or Revolution? which might be of interest to all three groups.

On the one hand, the course of Irish history dictates that no Irish Government can publicly oppose the Scottish aspiration to follow the Irish example and break the union with England. On the other, political realism dictates that support for the Scottish campaign for independence runs counter to the Irish national interest.

Fanning goes on to note that the personal relationship between Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern has been key to the peace process.

For Mr Ahern to embarass Mr Blair over Scotland would be base ingratitude as well as political folly, and his lukewarm endorsement of the devolved Scottish Parliament in his Lothian European Lecture in Edinburgh on 29 October 1998 – which was widely interpreted as a snub to the SNP – indicated he had no intention of doing so.

The larger political reality for any Irish Government is that the more successful the campaign for Scottish independence becomes, the greater the danger of the destabilisation of the United Kingdom. Such destabilisation – to say nothing of the possible disintegration – of the United Kingdom is not in Ireland’s interests; neither is it in Ireland’s interests that Scottish Independence should re-awaken what one Scottish trade unionist recently described as ‘the slumbering bear of English nationalism’. If that were to happen then the politically correct ‘British-Irish relations’ would become irrelevant and the traditional nomenclature of ‘Anglo-Irish relations’ would reflect the new political reality.

What is in Ireland’s interests, however, is that Britain should become more European, not less European; that she should, for example, adopt the euro as soon as possible. Here again, the danger is that tensions between Scottish and English nationalism will reinforce the innate anti-European instincts of England’s political establishment and popular press.

Finally, Fanning argues that Scottish independence threatens to later the strategic environment which made the peace process possible.

An independent Scotland would probably want to renegotiate its membership with NATO in a way which would at a minimum, exclude nuclear co-operation. Where would this leave the much vaunted shift of British policy heralded by the November 1990 speech of Secretary ofState for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, which declared that ‘the British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.’, and which subsequently found expression in the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 and the Framework Document of February 1995?

‘So far as can be foreseen’, reported a working party of British officials in 1949, ‘it will never be to Great Britain’s advantage that Northern Ireland should form part of a territory outside His Majesty’s jurisdiction.’ Scottish independence would reinvigorate that allegedly outmoded doctrine.

Plenty of food for though there. Any comments?