FINTAN O’Toole is one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.

For almost three decades his twice-weekly columns in the

Irish Times have covered almost every aspect of the country’s politics, culture and society. He is also a private man who only occasionally writes about his personal life.

So, last month, when O’Toole wrote of having a vasectomy 25 years ago, it resonated in Ireland. His point was political, not prurient: marriage was not the preserve of heterosexual couples who are, in the words of an Irish Catholic bishop, “open to life”. Just weeks after that column, Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of gay marriage.

O’Toole is far too self-effacing to take any credit for the victory, but when we speak on the phone a few days after the referendum he is clearly still elated by the result. “Joy just took over – there was a real sense of pleasure about the place,” he says of the rainbow -flag-bedecked celebrations in Dublin that were beamed across the world.

The most striking aspect of the marriage equality vote was not just the margin of victory – more than 60 per cent voted in favour – but that the vast majority of rural Ireland, long seen as the bastion of conservative Catholicism, said “yes”.

“That is epochal, that is where the really big change is,” says O’Toole. “It’s not liberal versus conservative anymore. That culture war is over.”

The 2008 banking collapse still casts a shadow over most of Ireland.


O'Toole says the culture war of liberal versus conservative in Ireland is over


But with a General Election due in the next 12 months, the equality referendum has changed the mood of Irish politics.

“There is a renewed sense of a democratic community,” says O’Toole.

“We have been through the hope and the deep despair and I think we are finally reaching a point where some sort of coherent progressive response might be possible. The question is what shape political change might take.”

O’Toole, who has written more than a dozen books and held positions at Princeton University, saw echoes of the Scottish independence referendum in Ireland’s campaign for marriage equality. Fear, he says, is no longer the powerful vote winner it once was.

“What we are seeing is increasingly people are not buying it [fear],” he says. “I think they are not buying it because they don’t have a sense of security. If you have a stable sense of the future that is fairly predictable then you are susceptible to fear, but if you are living in a world where nothing can be taken for granted, we are beginning to see that the fear thing doesn’t work as well. It is not as potent.”

“If I was a conservative in Ireland I’d really be thinking: “How do we run campaigns any more?” If you don’t have the fear factor it is whole different strategy that you need, and they don’t seem to know what it was.”

The same, perhaps, could be said of many on the pro-Union side in Scotland in any future referendum.

ON Thursday, O’Toole will deliver a lecture in Edinburgh titled “After Independence”. Scottish nationalists have long looked across the Irish Sea for inspiration, but what does Ireland’s experience almost a century ago have to teach Scots today?

The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that nationalists – and Unionists – tend to focus too much on change, ignoring how much stays the same after independence.

“You focus on the moment of separation, you focus on this rupture, and this great disjunction that is going to happen when Scotland becomes independent, but you don’t think about the continuities,” says O’Toole.

“I was over [in Scotland] a couple of times last year when the referendum debate was going on and it struck me that people’s expectations of independence on either side of the argument are perhaps somewhat exaggerated.”

Of course, Ireland in 1922 is not the same as 21st-century Scotland, but the former “is an interesting test case”. The war of independence and partition left Ireland a largely homogenous independent nation dominated by the Catholic Church. “But when you look at it at all sorts of levels the continuity stands out as strongly as the change,” says O’Toole, adducing the increase in Irish emigration to Britain after independence. Ireland “remained effectively part of the United Kingdom economy” until 1960.

The most striking continuity of all was language. “The single biggest aim of the Irish revolution was linguistic change,” says O’Toole. “If you had said to [Irish revolutionary and 1916 Rising leader] Patrick Pearse that you’ll have this revolution and Ireland will still be speaking English in 2015 he would have probably said “in that case it’s not worth it. Why would you kill anybody for that?”

The question of what independence is for became an increasingly central part of the referendum campaign. For O’Toole, the only valid reason for starting a new country is to build “a new kind of country” that can better tackle inequality.

“The issue is: does independence help you or hinder you in the achievement of certain types of transformative goals? Are you actually going to be able to use the tools of independence to forward that kind of agenda? If you’re not, it’s really not worth it. It is an enormous amount of collective energy that goes into [independence] and it’s an enormous distraction from things that you might just be better off getting on with.”

Until the financial crisis, the SNP pitch was a curious mix of social democracy and neo-liberal economics, epitomised by Alex Salmond’s appeal for Scots to join the “arc of prosperity” from Iceland to Ireland. The slaying of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger was a blessing in disguise for Scottish nationalists, says O’Toole.

“I think Ireland has done Scotland a great favour by collapsing,” he says. “It burst that bubble. All that rhetoric around the Celtic Tiger is usefully gone. It is really important that you know in advance that that was all rubbish, that the tasks are much more serious and long-term and that corporation tax isn’t just some sort of pixie dust that you can sprinkle over everything and it will be fine.”

SCOTLAND, says O’Toole, is much better placed than Ireland was to avoid the pitfalls that can follow independence, such as a focus on nationalism rather than the ability to better determine policy goals.

“That’s where Scotland’s great strength is. It’s coming to this question at a time when a great deal of the stupidity is gone and therefore you can take a decision on independence in a way that allows you to avoid having to learn the hard way what those stupidities were.

“I think Ireland wasn’t that fortunate. It had to go through this very painful process of learning what’s wrong with the monolithic identity, what’s wrong with defining yourself in opposition to somebody else.”

Identity is often cast as either/or. Scottish or British. Irish or English. The 21st-century reality is that relationships across these islands are both/and.

“Scotland will always be British. You can’t ever not be what you have been. It is part of your DNA. You can’t extract it. It is about being something else as well. What that is, that is where the excitement lies.”

Scotland’s constitutional tumult has not gone unnoticed in Ireland, particularly in the north. “Scottish independence would leave Northern Ireland in a very anomalous position,” says O’Toole. “Particularly if you put Scottish independence in the mix with potential English withdrawal from the EU. This is big stuff for Ireland.”

But the future for Ireland, as it is for Scotland, is the kind of open, capacious versions of identity performed on the streets of Dublin last month.

“If we are ever going to have a long-term solution on these islands it does involve the Irish majority accepting its Britishness, not in a way that diminished or undermines its Irishness. This place has been intertwined for centuries. We can’t undo that and why should we?”