The Mod, Scotland’s premier Gaelic festival, is to receive more than £2.7 million funding for a range of Gaelic education measures, he revealed. This includes:

• Support for a Gaelic Parents Advocacy Scheme to promote Gaelic education and provide support for parents
• £2.6 million to assist local authorities with the renovation and construction of dedicated Gaelic schools in the next two financial years
• Extended funding for the Gaelic Teacher Recruitment Officer based at Bord na Gaidhlig
• £70,000 to support a Youth Scheme that will create employment opportunities for young Gaelic-speakers.

“The Gaelic language is a vital way of seeing and understanding Scotland,” said Mr Salmond. “It contains the symbols and metaphors, stories and landscapes, that help define Scotland’s unique culture and history. As an essential part of our life, lore and language - Gaelic provides a valuable vehicle for passing Scottish understanding from one generation to the next.

“That is why the Scottish Government is committed to promoting Gaelic education, and why I’m delighted to announce more than £2.7 million of funding to support the development of this strand of our cultural matrix. This money will help young learners by supporting parents, schools, teaching and youth training.

“For talented Gaelic-speakers this is an exciting time, with a newly launched Gaelic language channel BBC Alba, the Fàs Centre established at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig to attract and support cultural enterprises, and a Gaelic Language Plan being developed. There should be no limit to the ambitions of modern Gaels.

“With Scotland’s Year of Homecoming fast approaching, I hope we can harness some of our Gaelic ambition to encourage even more people to travel to join us in Oban for our Homecoming Mod in 2009. As an opportunity for Gaels and non-Gaels to renew old friendships as well as forging new ones - the Mod is the perfect way to reconnect with Scotland, in any language.”

John MacLeod, President of An Comunn Gaidhealach, said: “If Gaelic is growing in strength in the public sector, its decline in family life and in the community is a cause for real concern. How many times do we experience a situation where a Gaelic speaker we know has died and very often with him/her the language dies in the family?  We still suffer from the legacy of our history – how little value the Gaelic language was seen to have.” 

He said there were still families in the Highlands and Islands where Gaelic-speaking parents refusing to pass on the language of their parents to their children.

“The only way I can describe that is ‘cultural negligence’ and that is something we must strive to reverse by means of encouraging and promotional projects that bring the real value of our language to everybody’s attention, and call on parents to accept a personal responsibility to pass on a ‘language gift’ to their children that will provide with richness of speech throughout their lives. That is a gift that is in every sense free, but yet has a value that is immeasurable.”           

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