Meeting of the Parliament 17 September 2024 [Draft]
I am grateful to Emma Harper for that intervention, because the value of the census is massive. While the results from the most recent census told a pretty stark story in relation to Gaelic, they told a different, and more nuanced, story in relation to Scots. At this point, we are getting the data from that census month by month, but we should already be looking ahead at what the most useful questions might be in the next census, and thinking about how we tie the strategy in with that and use the census as a way to measure success in that regard.
I highlight the reality that, in many of our communities, there is a hostility towards the public sector’s efforts to increase the use of Gaelic. It is worth exploring that, because—certainly in my experience locally—there is not so much an inherent hostility to the language; rather, in a lot of ways, it is about class dynamics in relation to Gaelic-medium education schools. The class make-up of the children who attend those schools can be quite different from that of those who attend other schools nearby, and we therefore need to take a more nuanced approach to the matter in order to build community support.
Nonetheless, I think that ministerial accountability for the national picture and for progress with regard to it is important, so we need to know what we are measuring progress against. To that effect, another amendment that might be useful would be to require that reports on progress are produced annually. There is a reporting requirement in the bill, but it is not clear that the reports would have to be produced annually. I should emphasise that I am talking about annual reports rather than annual targets.
I will go through a number of other potential amendments in my closing speech. Again, however, I emphasise the point that we should not be passing legislation simply because Parliament felt the need for legislation. There is a clear desire for us to do something genuinely transformational—that word was used a lot in evidence at stage 1. The bill that is currently in front of us does not do that, but I think that there is a clear parliamentary majority in favour of it, and that we are capable of bringing forward amendments to ensure that the bill creates the meaningful, transformational change for which both the Gaelic community and the Scots language community are crying out.