Seòmar agus comataidhean

They could do a lot of that just now, but we are reflecting on the fact that more needs to be done and that work needs to be accelerated and given much greater focus. In the past year, there has been a lot more focus on the community work that Bòrd na Gàidhlig and other community groups do, and the areas of linguistic significance will allow us to think through where those key Gaelic communities are and what a network looks like. How can we support the community work more than we do right now, and what is Bòrd na Gàidhlig’s role in supporting it? Bòrd na Gàidhlig has been extremely good at doing a lot of the education work; I think that the community work should be of equal standing, but to do community work, you need to recognise the community. There needs to be an identifiable community.

Yes, because it needs to go all the way through and we need to see education as a whole. It is not sufficient to have large numbers going through primary school and then dropping off in secondary 4 and 5. We want people to go right through primary, secondary and higher or further education and to take up the opportunities to continue to study the language. However, I am also of the view that we should not get so hung up on higher and further education that we forget the other opportunities for work and apprenticeships through the language. Otherwise, the danger is that Gaelic becomes an academic language of people who have studied it to a high degree; whereas, for a living and modern language, it needs to be used in whatever capacity people find themselves.

I am very supportive of what Comhairle nan Eilean Siar has done, which has led to tangible results in terms of young people opting for Gaelic. I think that parents are voting with their feet, and that is why there is such demand across different local authority areas. Local authorities have a duty to reflect on and recognise that.

When it comes to the responsibilities on local authorities, there will be a lot of parents who want English-medium education, but they also have the right to choose an education in their language of choice. It is about getting a balance, but there are some local authority areas in which there are communities of large numbers of speakers, such as the Western Isles, the Highlands and Argyll and Bute, for which I generally favour a more Gaelic first approach.

Thank you.

I would make two points. First, a financial memorandum is obviously not a budget—we will still have a budget bill every year. The financial memorandum indicates what we expect the costs to be, and the team have identified £694,000 as what they believe to be the additional costs. That does not mean that, embedded within that, there will be requirements on organisations and bodies to pivot their work to focus on certain areas and perhaps to focus less on others.

However, committee members know—because they will be scrutinising it—that in every budget there will be discussions about what we can do, irrespective of the bill. Even if the bill did not exist, there would be discussions about how much funding Bòrd na Gàidhlig should get. I hear regular calls from across the public sector for more funding at a time of extremely constrained public finances.

There is a lot of work to attract people in, which my colleagues can speak about if you want. We monitor the number of people who are teaching through Gaelic medium and the number of people who would be able to teach through Gaelic medium but are currently not teaching through Gaelic.

I can share the figures. The number of people who are able to teach through Gaelic at the primary level is 418; the number of those who are currently teaching through Gaelic is 266. For secondary, 183 are able to teach through Gaelic, and 121 are currently doing so. There is an opportunity there. Where you work and what you do is entirely a personal choice, but it is a matter of making Gaelic-medium education an attractive place to work and of attracting as many people as possible who are able to teach in Gaelic to do so.

Do you mean just in education terms—in relation to additional support and so on?

In responding to that question, I will make a number of points, the first of which is to do with the area of linguistic significance, which is really critical. That measure does not exist right now, and it will allow a more joined-up approach to be taken to the work that is required.

Much progress has been made in the past 20 years, but the focus on Gaelic plans and on education has perhaps not always given due recognition to the importance of people and communities. At the end of the day, Gaelic thrives in a community, so acknowledging that, in a particular area, multiple agencies and bodies will be responsible and accountable to the community is one significant change.

I completely agree with what Professor McLeod said about outcomes—it is always about outcomes. In that regard, it seems quite important that we are discussing the issue after yesterday’s publication of the census results, which indicated that there has been an overall increase in Gaelic skills. That is fantastic and should be celebrated. However, for the first time, Gaelic is now spoken by less than 50 per cent of people in the Western Isles, and that should be a wake-up call in relation to how we approach supporting such communities.

That is why it is essential for the bill to focus on outcomes. The outcome that I would like to see is a breadth and a depth of Gaelic. By breadth, I mean the number of speakers, and by depth, I mean the extent to which it is a living, breathing language. In other words, I want Gaelic to be not just an academic language of the classroom but a language that is used by people who work in communities—by plumbers, electricians, teachers, shopkeepers and so on. It is currently used in that way in communities, and we need to ensure that there is a community-wide approach to preserving the language.

I have been spending some time trying to understand the process that the bill has been through and some of the decisions that have been made. As you said, there is a challenging environment. The overall final cost is £694,000, but I would expect there to be a process to understand where any additional costs can be absorbed because of a refocus on different areas and where additional funding might be required.

You will be aware, perhaps, that broadcasting is a reserved area. A lot of work is going on at the moment in the House of Lords on amendments to the Media Bill to give BBC Alba and MG Alba equity with Welsh-language broadcasting. Welsh-language broadcasting has tens of millions of pounds, whereas Gaelic broadcasting is, in the words of the sector, on a shoestring budget.

I suggest that the financial memorandum alone is not the sum of all money that needs to be brought in to meet our objectives when it comes to Gaelic.

Got you; yes, I understand. I would expect public bodies—particularly in the areas of linguistic significance—to pay due regard to Gaelic and I would perhaps expect that of public bodies that were not otherwise doing that. I do not see that as a significant additional cost. For example, if you think of a responsibility on a public body to have staff who can answer queries on Gaelic, it might be that, in that area, there are already Gaelic speakers working in the organisation. That would be the case, more likely than not, in the Western Isles. Therefore, where there are responsibilities on public bodies, I would expect them to consider what that means for them.