Gordon McInally turns ethos into action

A young bagpiper parades out of a hotel banquet room playing the familiar refrain of “Scotland the Brave.” Behind him, carrying a plated ceremonial haggis and wearing blue, green, black, and yellow Gordon Modern tartan, is 2023-24 Rotary International President Gordon McInally.

It’s Burns Night, celebrated every January with folk music, drams of Scotch whisky, enthusiastic renditions of the songs and poems of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns, and, of course, haggis with neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes). It is quintessentially Scottish, and McInally is in his element with friends as he marks the occasion in Galashiels, a town in Scottish Borders close to his home in Yetholm.

Heather McInally, his wife of 42 years, is wearing a sash of tartan — checks of green, light blue, and dark red — created for the 1997 Rotary International Convention in Glasgow. A classically trained former professional opera singer and music teacher, she belts out songs by Burns learned from childhood.

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair,

Whene’er I forgather wi’ Sorrow and Care,

I gie them a skelp as they’re creeping alang,

Wi’ a cog o’ gude swats and an auld Scottish sang.

Now the haggis is something else.

It is made of a sheep’s pluck — the heart, liver, and lungs — minced with onions, oatmeal, suet, salt, pepper, and other spices, mixed with stock and then, originally, boiled in the animal’s cleaned stomach. It sounds like a culinary nightmare, but on their travels the McInallys have been spreading word of haggis’s appeal throughout the Rotary community.

Heather McInally explains how, on their visits to the States, they have sourced local supplies of haggis and even warmed up the Scottish delicacy in their hotel room microwave. “The smell of haggis lingered in the room the entire week,” she recalls. “We served it to other RI Board members while in Chicago.

Everyone seems to love it, even though they were not quite sure what they were eating.”