It’s time the Highlands and Islands got reparations for the sins of the clearances

It’s round about this time some patriotic soul sitting in his pants in his mum’s back room takes to social media to announce CalMac sailings have a 97% service and reliability rating and by comparison half the Staten Island ferries didn’t run at all last week, and that the Gebrovia to Narnia boat only sails every fifth Sunday in February! On behalf of islanders everywhere – thank you for your insight. Read more In the good old days, it wasn’t reliability that hampered island travel but cost – and for a few years at least the need to navigate the road blocks and protests at the Skye Bridge meant making a departure from Uig was always more doubtful that other routes. The eventual liberation of Skye from extortion was just one of a long list of injustices visited on the Gàidhealtachd over centuries; yet ironically this modern age of self-flagellation has not found any public leaders lying prostrate offering apologies for the sins of the past. It’s time that changed. My own accidental act of protest happened some 30 years ago now. I had not long returned from an early trip home from Inverness and found myself having a meeting...