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Naidheachd

Scotland’s Global Impact Conference: Speaker Articles

11th August 2009

By: Professor James Hunter, UHI
Title: Scotland should declare St Columba’s Day

Once an emigrant society, Scotland is increasingly a country of immigrants. So argues Professor James Hunter, director of the UHI Centre for History, who wants us to do more to celebrate our growing diversity.

For ages before Saint Andrew got the job, Scotland’s patron saint was one of our own people. But for all that he – unlike Andrew – lived here, our original patron saint was also an immigrant. Indeed, since he settled in Scotland when on the run from the authorities in his place of origin, he was, you might say, an asylum-seeker.

This particular asylum-seeker’s name was Colm or Calum. We call him Saint Columba. He came to Scotland from Ireland. And among his claims to fame is the fact that the community he founded on Iona – long afterwards the burial place of kings – became a spiritual and cultural centre of Europe-wide significance.

Latha Chaluim Chille, as Columba’s saint day is known in his own Gaelic language, is June 9 – a day that, by way of ensuring that this Year of Homecoming has a legacy, we should bring back to prominence.

I’ve travelled among Scotland’s diaspora – those millions of people of Scottish extraction who live today in many different countries. I share their pride in what their emigrant ancestors achieved. And I think it helpful to Scotland – a tiny country with a tinier population – that so many folk worldwide make so much of what they call their Scottish heritage.

If members of Scotland’s diaspora choose to celebrate this heritage by doing things that most of us don’t do, like joining clan societies, we should respect their choice. But we should also try to find ways of making links between our diaspora and Scotland as it is, instead of always harking back in such contexts to Scotland as it was.

This is all the more essential because Scotland – not least the Highlands and Islands where, for the first time for centuries, more people have been moving in than leaving – is starting to be, just like America or Canada, an immigrant society.

Our most famous Scot is Sean Connery. Nothing about his name is indigenous to Scotland. That’s becoming true of more and more Scots. By the end of this century, very many of us, perhaps the majority, will be partly of Irish, Polish, English, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, African, Italian or some other ancestry.

People of such varied background are unlikely to connect with our diaspora by way of clan gatherings. But they could connect by way of something far more basic – shared experience.

The experience of an economic migrant quitting the run-down Glasgow of the 1950s for Toronto; the experience of someone coming here today, for similar reasons, from Bucharest.

The experience of a Scottish family fleeing the clearances; the experience of a Darfur family fleeing still more horrifying persecution.

The experience of those nineteenth-century Highlanders whom a Melbourne immigration official described as idle, useless, filthy and savage; the experience of present-day emigrants, some of them in Scotland, who still encounter identical prejudices.

So let’s have one day annually in Scotland when we celebrate the diasporas – Irish, Chinese, English, Asian, whatever – here among us every bit as much we celebrate our own overseas diaspora. This would be a day devoted to diversity. A day for Presbyterians, Buddhists, Catholics, Sikhs and Muslims. A day for Polish or Indian music as well as Gaelic song.

By declaring such a day, we’d make clear to ourselves and others that being Scottish isn’t about ethnicity, or race, or background. It’s simply about being here, living here, working here.

This day, because of our first patron’s saint emigrant or immigrant status, should be Latha Chaluim Chille, Saint Columba’s Day, 9 June – a cheerier time of year, by the way, for a holiday than poor old Andrew’s day at the dreich, dark, tail-end of November.

Want to engage with Professor James Hunter’s arguments? Want to learn more about – or debate – emigration from, and immigration into, Scotland? Come along to Eden Court on 22, 23 and 24 October when these and other contentious topics will be firmly on the agenda.

Ends

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