Immersion is vital to save sinking Gaelic

GAELIC will get official status when the Queen signs off the new Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill in July. But how will this new-found "respect" save the language from extinction?

The bill’s attempts to revive Gaelic are commendable if wrong-headed. It would be nice if Dumfries and Fife and the Lothians could be persuaded to have Gaelic language policies. But the hard fact is that, with Gaelic facing wipe-out, this well-meaning but ultimately impotent bill is likely to be as helpful in saving the language as a cough drop for a pneumonia patient.

I commend the excellent work already being done to teach Gaelic by certain local authorities. But scarce resources should be directed where they will do most good. Only two things will save Gaelic - education and broadcasting. The Scottish Executive pays lip service to a digital Gaelic TV service in Scotland, but when it comes to paying for it, its response is lukewarm at best. Its proposed 11 million a year towards the annual 20 million that the channel will cost is merely indexing the Tories’ original 8 million to set up a Gaelic TV service.

But if the Executive is lukewarm, the attitude of Tessa Jowell’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport is positively chilly. Tessa has reportedly come up with 250,000 a year for the new service; compare that with the 100 million a year for the Welsh channel. Talk about "respect".

On education, if Gaelic is to survive, it will only be by using the methods successfully implemented in Ireland, Wales, Catalunya and elsewhere - in other words, by making immersion education compulsory in its remaining heartlands of Skye, Lewis, Harris and the Uists.

Until 1971, Welsh speakers in Wales were in decline. Following the immersion education strategy, there has been an 80,000 increase in Welsh speakers over the same three decades in which Scotland has lost 50,000 Gaelic speakers. The vast majority of parents in Wales are delighted their children are bilingual. The figures in Ireland are even more dramatic. In 1926, only 500,000 spoke Irish Gaelic. Now it’s 1.5 million.

If and when Gaelic were revived in its heartlands, it could be spread from a position of strength to adjoining local authorities and then to other areas that might be sympathetic.

The Scottish Parliament had a real chance to launch a fightback to save Gaelic. Sadly, I see nothing in the bill that will stop it becoming a mere cultural and academic curiosity - the linguistic equivalent of Marjorie Kennedy Fraser’s four-part harmonies of orain mhora, big songs doomed to be mouthed phonetically by kilted lowlanders at Mods in perpetuity.

Mairi Mhor nan Orain, big Mary of the Songs, lambasted the English for muzzling Gaelic in the 19th century. It had nothing to do with the English and everything to do with the Scots. With this bill, I believe a new generation of Scots is finally killing it off.

Ted Brocklebank is a Conservative list MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife.