Born 1,500 years ago and celebrated on both sides of the Irish Sea, St Columba was as adept at making connections across political and tribal boundaries as he was at exploring the boundary between Heaven and earth

Whether you call him Columba or (as Irish people do) Columcille, he is having a cracking anniversary year, despite Covid or maybe even because of it.

Without the pandemic, it is fair to say that more fanfare would have surrounded the anniversary of the birth in Donegal of the great apostle of Scotland. There would have been more cathedral services, exuberant pilgrimages in large vessels and speeches by the earthly great and good. Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins would have competed with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and perhaps even the UK’s premier Boris Johnson to find the right bon mot to connect the Gaelic seafarer with today’s post-Brexit dilemmas over the future of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The glorious complexity of Columba’s life is a gift to speech-writers. David Cameron contrived an ingenious link, exactly a decade ago, when he addressed the Northern Ireland Assembly on 9 June, the saint’s feast. Columba, the prime minister said, “specially symbolises the historic links and deep bonds between Britain and Ireland”. He added: “Born a prince of Donegal, exiled in Iona, and honoured today in the central lobby of the Palace of Westminster, his monks provided not just an Irish national treasure, the Book of Kells, but also a British national treasure, the Lindisfarne Gospels.”