IN a rare example of perfect timing, the academic world converged on Glasgow at the weekend to put devolution into the context of 1400 years of Irish-Scottish relations.

A packed public conference in the Barony Hall at Strathclyde University, entitled Celebrating Columba: Irish-Scottish Connections 597-1997, was inaugurated on Saturday by the Irish ambassador to the UK, Mr Edward Barrington, and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

From St Columba's establishment of Scotland's first Christian community on Iona to contemporary problems facing peace in Northern Ireland, the issues which both bind and separate the Scots and the Irish, were hammered out over two relentless days by historians, journalists and writers from both sides of the Irish Sea.

The conference was a result of the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative, an organisation set up in 1995 to forge intellectual links between the two countries and highlight a relationship which often has been passed over by historians for fear of exposing sectarian divisions.

Organisers from Strathclyde University, Aberdeen University and Trinity College, Dublin, were delighted by the confluence of historical anniversaries and political events which had put their conference smack in the middle of what Mr Barrington called a ''juncture in the history of these two countries, just as Scotland has made such a momentous development''.

The Irish ambassador gave a strong hint that this kind of intellectual debate presaged the development of new diplomatic contacts within Europe. ''I am hopeful for the future relationships of Scotland and Ireland. There is much we can do together,'' he said.

Recalling a visit which he and former Irish President Mary Robinson had made to the Scottish islands, the ambassador quoted - in both Gaelic and English - a line of Sorley Maclean's poetry: ''The humanity that the ocean could not break, that a thousand years has not severed.''

If a week is a long time in politics, however, 1400 years is indeed an ambitiously extended relationship. Even as historians travelled back into the murky tribal orgins of the Celtic brotherhood, it was Scottish-Irish divorces as much as the marriages, which possessed them.

One legend about St. Columba, for example, tells that the monk fell so in love with Iona that he would only travel back to his Irish homeland blindfolded and with sods of Hebridean earth tied to his feet in order that he might never leave Scotland. Another, by contrast, contains a proverb suggesting hatred for his adopted country: ''Better to die in Ireland than live forever in Alba.''

Taking two distinct forms, the conference swung between purely historiographical questions and the more volatile matter of, as one speaker put it ''how history got us where we are''.

At one point, during a discussion of the 17th and 18th centuries, a member of the audience walked up to the platform, having claimed direct descent from covenanting stock. ''Christianity not Catholicism,'' he declared, and was booed out.

The ultimate suggestion, made by several speakers at the conference, was that a decentralised Britain would allow for a more flexible relationship between Westminster and Northern Ireland, and would open an alternative avenue between Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Mr Fintan O'Toole, from the Irish Times, concluded on Sunday by contrasting misty-eyed historical myths with contemporary political realities. ''Scotland cannot fully emerge until it has dealt with the Irish aspect of its modern history,'' he said.

''Ireland cannot fully emerge unless and until it deals with the British aspect of its modern history. And neither can emerge without an engagement with the context within which these sharp angles rub up against each other - which is Northern Ireland.''