Eilein na h-Òige

Fiosrachadh

The name of Fr Allan McDonald (Maighstir Ailein, 1859-1905) is evergreen in the Gaelic-speaking islands of Uist, Barra and Eriskay. A native of Fort William, he wore himself out in the service of his parishioners at Daliburgh, and was transferred in 1894 to Eriskay, his beloved Eilein na h-Oige – ‘Isle of Youth’. Among his heroic labours was the publication of a Gaelic hymnal of which a Presbyterian minister wrote, ‘Several of the hymns in this collection are his own composition and seem to me to be very beautiful’.

Ronald Black has blended these with twenty-seven poems published in 1965 and other material, providing the resulting corpus of sixty items with an English translation, introduction and notes. The result is a lyrical celebration of the Catholic faith and a study of a major secular poet in the making – as Black says of Fr Allan’s satires, ‘They represent the bubbling and steaming of a huge literary talent, spilling over and lifting the lid of the pot’.