Ever since I was a boy in Raasay, and became aware of the difference between the history I read in books and the oral accounts I heard around me, I have been very sceptical of what might be called received history. The million people, for instance, who died in Ireland in the nineteenth century, the million more who had to emigrate, the thousands of families forced from their homes in the Highlands and Islands. Why was all that? Famine? Overpopulation? Improvement? The Industrial Revolution? Expansion overseas? You see, not many of these people understood such words, they knew only Gaelic. But we know now another set of words: clearance, empire, profit, exploitation. And today we live with the bitter legacy of that kind of history. Our Gaelic language is threatened with extinction, our way of life besieged by the forces of international big business, our country is beggared by bad communication, our culture is vitiated by the sentimentality of those who have gone away. We have, I think, a deep sense of generation and community. But this has in so many ways been broken. We have a history of resistance, but now mainly in the songs we sing. Our children are bred for emigration.
— Somhairle MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean, from the film Sorley MacLean’s Island (1974)
