The administration of Aberdeenshire Council (made up of SNP, Labour and the Progressive Independent Group) delayed setting the annual budget yesterday where savings of some £18 million have to be made, yet agreed to spend more money to help the Bord na Gaidhlig promote the Gaelic language in North East Scotland.

I am sure that it was not the intention of those who sealed the Gaelic Language Act 2005 – whatever political hue they were – to place additional financial burden on local authorities and other public bodies when the Act itself handed over not only the future of the language, but a handsome sum of some £5 million per annum in recent years, to a then new, unelected body – the Gaelic Board.

In September 2014, members of Policy & Resources Committee (P&R) were recommended to agree the content of the council’s draft Gaelic Language Plan and were told that the only areas where we had not met with the high level expectations was with respect to road signage and corporate identity (we had refused to change our logo and road signs to include Gaelic). The recommendations on this basis were agreed by P&R at that time.

In a report to P&R one year later, just this last September, we learned that the Gaelic Board were not content with our “balanced, well-measured plan that met the spirit of high level expectations and the Act” and suggested areas where we might want to reconsider. That committee report stated that 514 responses were gathered from a consultation but omitted to say that only 54 responses had been returned from residents, stakeholders and partner organisations. P&R narrowly agreed to conform to the Bord’s further demands hence the paper came up again in full council yesterday for all members to vote on – if the Bord na Gaidhlig had accepted our measured and proportionate response put forward in 2014 and had not threatened sanctions, our Gaelic Language Plan could have been in place.

Although I have written tongue-in-cheek about this subject here before, for me this was never about pitting Gaelic against Doric; we have a duty as parents and grandparents to keep local languages or dialects alive for the next generation; it is not the duty of cash-strapped councils.

Amidst claims of being disrespectful to Scottish history, we lost the vote.

You can read the full report here (item 12).