Fòram Gàidhlig Inbhir Nis (Inverness Gaelic Forum) today (5 June) expressed their deep disappointment at the recently-launched Highland Council Gaelic Language & Culture Plan, describing it as being desperately unambitious and a missed opportunity for the revival of Gaelic in the Gàidhealtachd (Highlands & Islands).

The local authority's Gaelic Plan was launched last Monday (May 30th) by the Education Minister Peter Peacock, with a commitment to increase the numbers of Gaelic speakers in the Highlands, and to support and promote Gaelic as a community language in the Highlands, but there is some doubt over whether the plan itself can actually go about achieving this.

Inverness Gaelic Forum Development Officer, Brian Ó hEadhra said, “While we welcome the publication of a plan which seeks to increase speaker numbers and secure Gaelic's future as a community language, I simply fail to see how this plan will go about achieving these ends.”

There is concern amongst Gaels that the plans falls down in a number of key areas. Firstly, the plan fails to set any measurement criteria against any of its objectives, “although the Council has published a four-year plan committing the local authority to increasing speaker number and promoting Gaelic as a community language in the area, such commitments are almost meaningless platitudes if there area no targets against which we can assess whether or not the Council has failed or succeeded against these aims. We would ask questions such as how many speakers and which communities?” said Brian.

The Council has also been criticized for its lack of ambition in the education sector, where it appears that the only exposure most schoolchildren in the Highlands will get to the native language of the area will be a the showing of brief video on the subject. Inverness Gaelic Forum felt this to be totally inadequate. “We recognise the importance of Gaelic Medium Education and are surprised and disappointed the council has failed to take this opportunity to make it the medium for all primary school education in areas such as on the Isle of Skye. For the vast majority of schoolchildren in the area though, it is desperately sad to think that yet another generation growing up in the Gàidhealtachd will have very little knowledge of the culture and language of the area in which they are growing up. I would go as far as to say that most of the schoolchildren in the Gàidhealtachd are being disenfranchised in this respect.”

The council have also been roundly criticised in failing to take the lead on the introduction of bilingual signage across the area raising the language's visibility and profile in a simple but effective way. The Plan commits the local authority to introduce Gaelic road signs unless there exists 'no Gaelic cultural base', but the mention of such a condition has met with some surprise. “The local authority is Gaelic name is Comhairle na Gàidhealtachd, translated as the land of the Gaels (the Gaelic-speaking people). It is our strong Gaelic 'cultural base' which defines this area as culturally distinctive from regions in the Scottish Lowlands and it seems to me bizarre to say that area within the Gàidhealtachd have no Gaelic heritage, one can see from looking at census statistics for example that Gaelic-speaking communities survived even in parts of Caithness until into the 20th century.”

Fòram Gàidhlig Inbhir Nis (Inverness Gaelic Forum) is a community group based in Inverness which seeks to represent the voice and the views of the Gaelic community in the city.