The Council of the Isles, proposed under the Belfast Agreement, is an exciting development for everyone on the islands of Britain and Ireland, according to a Scottish MEP.
Prof Neil MacCormick, a constitutional lawyer at Edinburgh University and vice-president of the Scottish National Party, was in Dublin yesterday to give the John Kelly Memorial Lecture to the law faculty in UCD. He told The Irish Times it might help the parties in the North to reach a settlement if they realised that a large number of people in Scotland favoured independence in Europe.
"The EU, at a minimum, is moving towards some kind of federation of states which themselves are largely federal," he said. "The UK model is more like Spain and Belgium than Germany, which has a formal federal structure. The Council of the Isles is one of the frameworks for development in that context."
He said he would be very concerned about the enlargement of the EU and its implications for Scotland. "I would be concerned about a diminished role for Scotland. At the moment we have eight MEPs and it would hardly be worth turning up if that was reduced to four or five."
He stressed the importance of Scotland being represented in the legal institutions of the EU, as there was more movement towards the harmonisation of law among EU states.
Speaking of a future independent Scottish constitution, he said there should be a referendum subsequent to independence on the question of the monarchy. While personally he favoured retaining Queen Elizabeth as head of state, there was an equally valid view favouring a republic.
Referring to the discussion of Scottish identity that has accompanied the growth of the pro-independence movement, he stressed that Scottish citizenship was open to anyone permanently resident in Scotland or born there. "We are against any kind of ethnic definition of Scottish," he said. "That is never even faintly an issue. There is some sensitivity to `white settlers', people moving up from the south, but that is mainly because of things like house prices."