Allan MacDonald (poet)

The Reverend Allan MacDonald (Scottish Gaelic: Maighstir Ailein, An t-Athair Ailean Dòmhnallach) (25 October 1859, Fort William – 8 October 1905, Eriskay) was a Scottish Catholic priest and activist during the later phases of the Highland Clearances. He was a religious and secular poet in Scottish Gaelic and a respected folklorist and collector from the oral tradition in the Highlands and Islands.

Born into a middle class family he was raised to only speak English by his parents. While studying for the priesthood, MacDonald chose to also begin studying Gaelic, his ancestral heritage language, and was later to become both a fluent speaker and writer. After ordination MacDonald was assigned to the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles during the final decade of the Highland Clearances. This was during the height of the Highland Land League agitation and MacDonald became inspired by the Irish Land War. Under orders from his bishop, a leading activist for tenant's rights, reasonable rents, security of tenure, free elections, and against religious discrimination that were keeping his parishioners in the Outer Hebrides critically impoverished.

In 1889, MacDonald published a Catholic hymnal of traditional hymns in Gaelic, which is still in use. He died of pneumonia, pleurisy, and influenza in Eriskay at the age of only 45. Celticist Ronald Black wrote that had MacDonald, a pioneer of symbolist and modernist poetry in Gaelic, not died prematurely, "the map of Gaelic literature in the twentieth century might have looked very different."