Hansard

I thank Alasdair Allan for bringing this important debate to the chamber. I am sure that each and every resident of Lewis and Harris appreciates such a traumatic event receiving the recognition of a chamber debate just two weeks away from the centenary.

As I am a Leòdhasach, or Lewisman, this is probably the most difficult speech that I have ever had to write or, indeed, to deliver in the chamber. As I was born and bred not just on Lewis but on the farm where the tragedy happened, the Iolaire disaster has been deeply ingrained in me since I could be aware of it as a toddler.

The Beasts of Holm, where the Iolaire ran aground, are technically just a few yards off the cliffs and rocks at Stoneyfield farm. At the time of the tragedy, my great-grandfather had not yet taken over Stoneyfield. The farmer at the time was Anderson Young, who opened the Stoneyfield farmhouse doors to many of the 79 survivors who made it ashore on that horrendous night, giving shelter and warmth to them. However, soon after the tragedy, he moved with his family to Canada, presumably in large part because of the trauma that the tragedy had caused to him, his wife and children.

My great-grandfather took on the tenancy of Stoneyfield just a few months after the tragedy, and my grandfather took on the tenancy of neighbouring Holm farm a few years later. At the time of the tragedy, my grandfather and my three great-uncles were in their late teens and early 20s, living in the village of Sandwick, next to the farms, and they would have been involved in the retrieval of the bodies from the shores of Sandwick beach and around the farm shoreline on that fateful day. I do not know for sure that that was the case, because they never talked about it. That has been the case on the island since the tragedy—nobody, or very few people, spoke of the disaster. Even when I was growing up in the 1960s, some 40 to 50 years after the disaster, it was still not discussed, so the many events and commemorations that are taking place on the island are acting in a cathartic way, allowing people to come to terms, at long last, with the grief and hurt that still exist and are still tangible on the island to this day.

It took just over 40 years for an official memorial to be erected at the site. My grandfather donated the land for the memorial, and I am pleased to see that it has been renovated for the centenary and that the path down to the memorial from the former coastguard station road end has been greatly improved in advance of the commemorations.

As someone who was born and brought up at Stoneyfield and Holm farms, I have experienced the impact of storm-force gales there. On the night of the tragedy, the ship ran aground during what was up to a force 10 gale—possibly stronger. I have walked around the headland at Holm point in force 10 gales, and stronger, a number of times—one time, I lost my footing and nearly slipped into the rough sea—and I have seen walls of water lifting up from Stornoway bay and crashing into the Stoneyfield farmhouse, so what those poor souls endured is beyond my comprehension, and it is beyond my understanding how there were even 79 survivors on such an horrendously stormy night.

As the award-winning blogger Katie Laing puts it in her excellent Hebrides Writer blog,

“The Iolaire is in our DNA”.

I have found it difficult to put my feelings into words, so, if it is all right, Presiding Officer, I will quote the current minister of St Columba’s church in Stornoway, the Rev William Heenan. At the opening of the exhibition at Sandwick hall, he said:

“As we approach the 100 year anniversary of the Iolaire disaster, the memories of the inconsolable loss of life still evokes deep emotions in our island population—emotions that have been inherited from previous generations who lived through that fateful Hogmanay night and who had personally experienced the ‘darkest dawn’ of New Year’s Day 1919.

The cloud of silence which then enveloped this island and her people and which has pervaded this community in every generation since, is only now beginning to lift.

These last four years of rolling commemorations for the First World War and the various major battles fought during it, have in some respect helped to prepare us, for this the hardest and final of these commemorations—the loss of the Iolaire.

However, the silent grief, borne by the people of Lewis and Harris; the excruciating pain of the sorrow which has permeated every fibre in the warp and weft of the fabric of this society; and the lack of both information and answers as to why and how the disaster occurred; have to a large extent inhibited the island from processing and working through their loss, and coming to terms with their heartache.

Time has helped to heal some of the wounds inflicted by the events of that terrible night, enabling people to at last begin to speak about it and to process its harrowing legacy, but the scars of the tragedy still remain. They are indelibly ingrained on the psyche of islanders and their diaspora, just as the peat-banks and lazy-beds now no longer worked still mark and scar the landscape of our island topography.”