Bombing is modern to Iolaire disaster
the disaster occurred have to a large extent inhibited the island from processing and working through their loss, and coming to terms with their heartache.
‘Time has helped to heal some of the wounds inflicted by the events of that terrible night, enabling people to, at last, begin to speak about it and to process its harrowing legacy, but the scars of the tragedy still remain.
‘They are indelibly ingrained on the psyche of islanders and their diaspora, just as the peat-banks and lazy-beds now no longer worked still mark and scar the landscape of our island topography.’
Comparing the Iolaire’s loss to the Lockerbie disaster of December 21, 1988, when 270 people lost their lives, he added: ‘I trust that this exhibition and all events related to this 100-year anniversary will prove to be therapeutic for our community in its prolonged and continuing recovery from the dreadful loss inflicted by the Iolaire going onto the Beasts of Holm.’
Mr Matheson thanked Angus and Mary McCormack of Sandwick Community Council for being instrumental in organising the exhibition.
And he said: ‘The Iolaire disaster cast a deep and long-lasting shadow over our community. It was followed in short sequence by the failure of Leverhulme’s plans, by the mass emigration of young men and women on the Metagama and the Marloch, by the effects of the world depression of 1929, by the government-caused collapse of our vital herring industry and then by the new carnage of the Second World War…
‘It seemed as if we had a devastatingly pessimistic future but our people hung on.’
He also thanked Rev Prof Norman Drummond and Maggie Cunningham of the Scottish Commemoration Committee, the Working Group led locally by Norman MacDonald and Lord Lieutenant Donald Martin.
Performances of music and poetry followed.