Irish visitors

Last Friday I had the pleasure of taking 5 Irish gentlemen to a small ceilidh in Oban. Yesterday they went to Iona & today I took them to Kilmartin, Dunadd and St Cloumba's cave. They were a great bunch and were over on a fact finding mission to try to connect more with Irish & Gaelic. The one overriding feature they sadly left with is that here in Argyll once described as the cradle of Gaelic etc they saw almost no official regognition of the language save for some road signs and on the CalMac Ferries.
They were mega dissapointed with the poxy wee sign pointing the direction to Dunadd. One of them asked if we were ashemed of the place when the road sign was so minute and had they not been following my car they would have driven past it. Next they were shocked at the historic Scotland info plates again they asked why no Gaelic and no Irish being as this is one of the best places to understand the link between Ireland & ARgyll.
I should add that two of the party were emminant language professors and indeed one of them was multi lingual and he travelled in my car and in between him speaking Irish to me he also spoke Spanish and was very familiar with the Basque Region and with South America. Indeed I never spoke English to them the entire time and though sometimes I struggled, we managed to converse in our two ancient Celtic tongues!
Finally I took them to see St Columba's cave in Ellery and they said they would never have found it in a month of Sundays as there was absoulutly NO Signs whats so ever to say where it was.
Its a sad tesetment to our tourist indurstry! Whats the point of having tourist sumit meetings in swanky places such as the one next week on Bute which unfotrunaltey I cant get to when one of the most important aspects of our culture is as one of the Irish men put so well "your dirty little secret"
Angyll & Bute cooncil keep harping on about the development of the Coulmba trail which would be excellent but seriously they need to get a move on! There is more being done on the Irish side to promote this than there is here and heres an odd fact, Im on the commitee for that for Ireland but not for here! The Columba Trail from Campbletown through Kintyre, Mid ARgyll & over to Mull & Iona if properly developed would be a wonderful asset to this area so why are we still sitting on our hands having stupid summits and back patting when we should be out physically marking the way, talking to tourist providers all along the route and promoting places like Campbeltown, Carradale, Kilmartin and not just Oban Mull & Iona.
I challenge anyone to ask me to do a route for them to follow that will allow them to do a nice wee tour and I dont even work in the tourist trade!
Happy Mothers day to you all