Seeing ads like the one above in print would be something of a novelty today if not improbable in the extreme. They weren't exactly commonplace in the 60s but companies of local and national renown would place ads like these in the pages of Gairm - the famous Gaelic quarterly that ran from 1951 to 2004.
Writers such as Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley MacLean, Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, Eilidh Watt and George Campbell Hay contributed prose and poems in Gaelic. Here though, it was an ad for a garage in Oban that caught my eye. Not only did the garage advertise in the language of the western Highlands and Islands but it supplied Morris autos to everyone who wished one, from the Butt of Lewis to Kintyre.
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| Agus uisge-beatha? Gu dearbh! |
With print media in decline, we aren't going to see ads like this again in the pages of Steall, our current literary magazine for Gaelic readers. Digital and social media though presents a world of opportunities to 'normalise' our language, even if only on a local basis in those places where Gaelic is still spoken in the community.
Here's to Gaelic industry on a tee!
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