A NEW schools resource which celebrates the contribution Runrig have made to the Gaelic language and culture has been launched.
The unit focusing on the Scots band is from Gaelic educational resources organisation Storlann Naiseanta na Gaidhlig and is being hailed as a key addition to the Gaelic resource corpus.
It is part of Storlann’s Fileanta suite of resources for fluent Gaelic speakers in secondary school, although it can also be used with some learner classes.
It became available to schools in August, a few days before the band played their farewell concerts at Stirling City Park. The unit has also been launched at Stirling’s Wallace High School.
As with all Fileanta resources for Gaelic classes, the Runrig unit is available exclusively online and had been planned before the band announced their retirement.
The unit includes the text of nine songs for literary analysis, seven passages for close reading, a class project for young people to write a Gaelic song of their own and two interviews – an old BBC interview with Seonaidh Beag, the man who inspired the song The Cutter and another with founding Runrig member Calum MacDonald, which was recorded especially for Fileanta.
There is also a timeline of the band, illustrations by Des Campbell and various external links.
“Storlann is delighted to acknowledge Runrig’s significant contribution to the regeneration and development of Gaidhlig language and culture,” said Storlann chief executive Donald W Morrison.
“I consider this new piece of work to be wholly apposite, when one considers that the roots of Runrig lie in a time where Gàidhlig language development was finding a place in communities and on strategic public agendas.”
Mairi Macritchie, Storlann project officer for secondary school resources who helped develop the unit, said: “Runrig worked hard and fought for Gaelic at a time when there wasn’t a lot of support for Gaelic.”
The unit can be found online at www.storlann.co.uk/fileanta/leughadh-litreachas and has been downloaded nearly 350 times – more than four-times the number of secondary schools in Scotland involved in teaching Gaelic.
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