Faeroes Offers Blueprint For Highlands And Islands Success
27 Sep 2007
COMMUNITIES in the Highlands and Islands should follow the lead of the Faeroe Islands by taking more control of their economy and promoting to their distinct culture, according to a new report from the Policy Institute.
Oli Breckmann, a senior Faeroese politician, said that although the Highlands are performing well economically, growth is focussed around Inverness while remote areas continue to suffer population decline.
He suggests that devolving power to local communities could boost remote economies and increase cultural self-confidence, including the grass-roots promotion of Gaelic in appropriate areas. This could help the region emulate the Faeroes, where the population has trebled to 48,000 in the last century.
In a paper for the Policy Institute, Breckmann says community control over local taxation, planning, transport, education, enterprise policy and culture could reinvigorate remote parts of the Highlands and Islands.
Essential to the Faeroe Islands’ success story, adds Breckmann, has been the flourishing of Faeroese as the day-to-day language of business, politics, literature and leisure. Faeroese gives the people of the islands a cultural home and provides them with a powerful incentive to succeed at home instead of emigrating.
Breckmann said: “Cultural self-confidence can engender economic success. Prosperity is created by human ingenuity, rather than by access to natural resources. By motivating people to succeed at home, even the most barren outcrop can flourish.”
Essential to establishing Gaelic as the everyday language is school education in the language. In the Faeroes, says Breckmann, parents see bilingualism as an enviable advantage for their children. However, he warns that, “such an approach should not be imposed from above. Devolving decision making over schooling to small communities will allow them to take this road should they so wish.”
He added: “The Highlands faces a fork in the road. There is a route which offers some hope of material progress, with cultural integration into the rest of Scotland and Great Britain. Scenically attractive, and economically prosperous, but essentially unremarkable.
“The alternative is a diffused, dynamic Highlands and Islands, exploiting its renewed cultural identity to achieve population growth and economic opportunity in the remotest areas. Trading on its differences with the rest of Great Britain to engender a sense of local pride and home-grown prosperity. Using a dual identity to its advantage in a globalised world of many cultures.”