Burns Birls in His Grave

For 10 years I visited Edinburgh every August, stayed at the Balmoral Hotel at the north end of Princes Street, took Buster for his early morning walk up Calton Hill and ended our excursion in the Old Calton Burial Ground. We spent a few minutes among the graves of Scottish enlightenment, paid our respects to the statue of Abraham Lincoln, which celebrates the Scots who died fighting for the Union in the American civil war, and returned for breakfast, physically tired but spiritually refreshed. Not any more. A notice has appeared by the cemetery gate. It announces that acting under the powers conferred on it by the Scottish Civic Government Act of 1982, the Edinburgh Corporation has made it an indictable offense to bring a dog into a cemetery or churchyard.

It is the denial of Scottish folklore, far more than the personal inconvenience, that fills me with rage at the foolishness of the city fathers. Do they not recall Greyfriars Bobby, the dog that was so devoted to his dead master that he would not leave the old man's graveside? Its statue, outside the churchyard where it kept watch for 14 years, is still an object of veneration. A dog that behaved in that way today would, presumably, be taken to the Lothian pound. When I mentioned the denial of Scottish history to a young convert to Scottish nationalism, he told me that his recently adopted party did not regard his native land as a "tartan theme park". Scotland was to become a land of enterprise and electronics. His emphatic rejection of pibroch in favour of broadband helped me to understand why, although a passionate supporter of Irish independence, I don't feel the same about Scotland.

My reasons for supporting the Union range from the unashamedly sentimental to the robustly practical. I have too much affection for Scotland to want it to become a foreign country. More important, I believe that the power and prosperity enjoyed by the two nations is greater when we work in partnership than they would be if we lived apart. Add to that the not unimportant consideration that most Scots do not want independence and the difference with Ireland becomes clear before we even begin to consider that, in one case, the land mass is continuous and, in the other, two nations are divided by a turbulent sea. But there is another element to the nationalist equation that distinguishes Irish nationalism from Scottish. At the time when Ireland was fighting for independence it was enjoying an essentially Irish cultural revival.

I do not suggest that Scotland is not producing, as it has always produced, a disproportionately large share of the UK's literary and artistic talent. But there is nothing, or at least nothing of equal merit, to compare with Yeats's The Celtic Twilight - a conscious attempt to prove that an Irish cultural identity existed long before Anglo-Irish writers graduated from Trinity College Dublin and left Ireland to earn their livings in London. Cathleen ni Houlihan may have only existed in the imagination of a myth-prone people. But the idea of an ancient queen, who inspired her people to assert their nationhood, spread out from the Abbey Theater. The Countess Markievicz was waiting to take part in rehearsals for one of its amateur productions when she found a copy of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith's magazine, lying about. After reading it, for her, all was suddenly changed. It is difficult to imagine Braveheart having the same effect.

No doubt, Scottish nationalists celebrate the life and work of Robert Burns every January 25. It would take a greater knowledge of his poems than I possess to say whether or not he had much to say about Scotland as an independent nation. Hugh MacDiarmid - who questioned Burns's merits in a way I would not dare to copy - was certainly a nationalist. He was one of the founders of the SNP. But who is writing about the cultural identity of Scotland now? At a previous Edinburgh Festival I was encouraged to see a performance by the recently formed Scottish National Theatre with the argument that it "spoke for contemporary Scotland". The characters swore a lot and drank beer from cans. Contemporary Scotland is better than that. But I am not sure that it is culturally distinct from England. If you disagree, think of the works of Sir Walter Scott. And, in Princes Street, he has a monument to rival the Albert Memorial.