It’s long been typical of Gaidheals that they lack pride in themselves, and particularly in their own language.  Quite why this should be so is far from clear.  Why should someone who spoke two languages feel inferior to one who spoke only one?  Perhaps it was because the monoglot was the factor, the bailiff or at least someone with a white-collar job and ‘minister’s hands’.  Gaelic betrayed you as uneducated, unqualified and poorly connected.  All things considered, then, it was best to lose it once you were upwardly mobile; even better to pretend you never had it.

This might be a great help when it came to social networking, but it carried its own risks.  Those who knew you when you were running about barefoot, and living, like themselves, on potatoes and herring, might take it ill when you returned home, pretended you hadn’t a  word of Gaelic in your head, and dripped such posh words as ‘shall’ and ‘actually’: words never heard in Garyvard.

This particular kind of Gaidheal is now extinct.  Indeed the wheel has come full circle.  Edinburgh’s professional elite now prize Gaelic-medium education, and instead of Lewismen haughtily denying that they have Gaelic, you have Morningsiders proudly telling you that they’re learning the language; and not only do they tell you, but they look you in the eye and challenge you to conduct a conversation without using a single word of English.  They don’t seem to understand how difficult it is for a Stornoway cove to speak Gaelic without words like ‘wonderful’ and ‘beautiful’ escaping his lips at regular intervals.

But the latest ecclesiastical news suggests that the misplaced sense of embarrassment which once crippled the Gaidheal has now been transferred to the church; or least to the Free Church, which is showing increasing signs of being ashamed of its own theology, history and traditions, and wishing it were somebody else.  Local congregations want to drop the name ‘Free Church’ from their notice-boards and give themselves some other handle.  They’re clearly scared that if their real identity comes out, ‘normal’, ‘contemporary’ human beings will run a mile.

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It would be interesting to know what Dr. Peter Kearney’s employers really think of his recent outburst about sectarianism in Scotland .  Dr Kearney is Director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, but no one seems to have told him that the messenger must never become the message; which is exactly what he became last week with his ridiculous comparison of the plight of Scottish Catholics to that of American blacks in the worst days of segregation.

Many minds boggled besides mine, and there’s no need for me to add further words to the chorus of disbelief.  The position of American blacks before the Civil Rights Movement was most famously expressed in Billie Holiday’s song, ‘Strange Fruit’:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

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