The Scottish Government's Minister for Gaelic, Alasdair Allan (right), has welcomed the decision by City of Edinburgh Council to create a dedicated new Gaelic primary school at Bonnington.
The vacant and now ruinously vandalised former primary school on Bonnington Road will be renovated largely thanks to Holyrood funding of £1.8m.
'I am sure parents and pupils alike will welcome today's decision,' said Dr Allan yesterday. Leith Central Community Council, which backed the project, will agree having earlier identified potential benefits such as incoming families and increased trade for local businesses.
Not everybody is so convinced. Respect, affection, even support for the active promotion of Gaelic are not unusual locally. But doubts remain:
- Edinburgh is not a traditional Gaelic-speaking area. Would not this money have been better spent for the same purpose elsewhere?
- How can anyone justify further salami-slicing Edinburgh's inadequate Education budget at a time of financial crisis?
- What difference will Broughton really notice apart from increased traffic during rush-hours?
- Rather than advancing Gaelic, does this project not pander mostly to the preoccupations of middle-class, disinterested, cherry-picking parents in the same way as certain faith schools have done for many years?
Sceptics will also wonder whether the new Bonnington Gaelic school – which inevitably will impact upon the budgets of all other state schools across Edinburgh – is merely a symbolic, political project to gratify SNP aspirations at local and national levels.
There is, of course, a delicious irony to all this, and genuine Gaelic speakers – for so long marginalised and undervalued – certainly deserve their moment at the receiving end of the public trough.
Spurtle wishes the new school well, but urges it to forge more than superficial local links with its host community if it is to be seen as an additional resource rather than an irrelevant interloper.