Scotland’s clan chiefs are coming in for stick as the bill for amusing Americans at the Clan Gathering in Holyrood Park has finally landed. Despite attracting 47,000 visitors from 40 countries and generating over £10 million for the Scottish economy, the centrepiece of Edinburgh’s Homecoming Week somehow failed to wash its saltire-emblazoned face making a £600,000 loss. The taxpaying clansmen and women of Scotland of course will pick up the tab --look at clan history and you may conclude it was ever thus – and the homecoming vehicle has been bailed out to allow a repeat bed-filling opportunity in 2012 or 2014 with the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn.
Before the autopilot is locked and loaded, however, prominent voices – including this paper -- have suggested the financing arrangements at least should be reconsidered. Those voices will get louder as public spending cuts bite and the SNP’s enthusiasm for all things kilted and couthy appears to be an embarrassing and expensive anachronism which should be funded directly by clan chiefs and the tourism industry.
The awkward truth is that modern Scots don’t rate clans but wealthy Americans do. Apparently two thirds of Clan Chieftainships lie empty or dormant while across the Atlantic, our American and Canadian cousins are busily creating new clans from septs (or branches) of old clans and from lowland families with no formal clan tradition. Europeans are also warming to the sense of connectedness the clan offers with 140 Scottish festivals this summer in Germany, France and Belgium. And they aren’t small get-togethers. The average crowd is reportedly 15 thousand. As Professor Tom Devine recently observed of their untapped economic potential, “Whaur’s your Irish pubs noo?”
Is that as good as it’s going to get? In the certain knowledge that our tartan past sells, will we manage to hold our collective and largely urban, lowland breath for another fortnight and pretend that clans, malt whisky and golf are part of our everyday lives till the visitors go home?
The word Clan engages the heads of accountants not the hearts of patriots in Scotland even though precisely the opposite obtains outside our borders. We are in it but believe we are not of it.
This matters. Unless native Scots connect with their own clan heritage, the grudging reaction to the relatively small Homecoming overspend will be the first of many as kilted extravaganzas proliferate in Scotland’s seemingly endless roll-call of significant battle-related anniversaries.
The Global Impact conference in Inverness this week may prove pivotal. For three days prominent academics will fit together the jigsaw pieces they carry from every part of the globe and the picture they piece together may quash forever the notion that Highland Clan society was a slow, regressive, ignorant place. To read more - click here.
we're really Egyptian, you know ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThnHG4Smkg
Posted by: bru | October 19, 2009 at 02:24 PM