Nation: The Faroe Islands, the first film in a riveting series.

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NHU Brittany is delighted to introduce you to a new series of videos: Nation.

Faroe Islands
We owe this series to Lesley RIDDOCH and Phantom Power Films.
Lesley RIDDOCH is a broadcaster based in Scotland. She is also a journalist and activist. She was the editor at The Sunday Herald then deputy editor at The Scotsman.

In this wonderfully-constructed series, Lesley RIDDOCH introduces us to some Nordic Nations other than her own Scotland. Some of them are already independent and others soon will be.
But what we are going to find most of all is this incredibly ability of these northern peoples to make their countries European nations which are incredibly modern and democratic, where their citizens are happy to live together.

There are some fantastic examples for Brittany here …

We start this series with the Faroe Islands, which we’ve already discussed in our columns.
We’ll continue with Iceland, Norway and Estonia.
The Faroe Islands archipelago is located 320 kilometres to the north of Scotland. It has a surface of 1399 km² and a population of 50 000. This means that it’s smaller than a single of Brittany’s five départements. It also has less than 1% of the population of Brittany.

The Faroese capital, Tórshavn, is almost 1300 kilometres away from Denmark, the country from which the country is moving away more and more. Like Greenland, the Faroe Islands have a status which gives them a very high degree of autonomy and they are on the way to full independence.

Independence ?

In April 2004, a referendum showed 50.72% in favour of independence for the Faroes from Denmark, with a record turnout of 91.1%. But this unilateral declaration of independence was rejected by Copenhagen. There’s not just Catalonia which is having to struggle against an anti-democratic central power.

Faroese is the official language and its teaching in schools is compulsory.
This small country’s economy is 95%-dependent on fishery resources: fishing and fish-farming.
In Brittany, farming and food production are the dominant economic activities.

Here, 5G is everywhere and the Faroese are connected digitally permanently to the rest of the world. In Brittany, we are far, far away from this. And in the Faroes, the government wants to open up its country, whereas in Brittany they mostly want to lock us away.
In addition, the fifty thousand Faroese have three daily newspapers, six radio stations, including one public one and one TV channel.

Surrounded by water and highly subject to the winds, the Faroes are targeting 100% renewable energy by 2030 (that’s tomorrow!). Here again, unfortunately, while we have the same natural resources in Brittany, we are still far, far away from this.
If you want to decide, you have to pay
The right to decide for ourselves

By JML for NHU Brittany

Nation Faroes: our sources
lesleyriddoch.com
www.government.fo
insee.fr

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