There was a rather intriguing line in the vision unveiled earlier this week by Scotland's three islands councils.

It made the case for stronger powers being devolved to them, whether Scotland votes yes or no in next year's independence referendum.

In their document entitled Our Islands Our Future, they said one of the things they are going to be seeking from the Government is: "Clarification of the role of HIE (Highlands and Islands Enterprise) and any adjustment required to promote greater integration."

Given that it is now 22 years since HIE replaced the old Highlands and Islands Development Board, one would have thought the agency's role might have been clear by now.

Since then HIE's focus has changed away from business start-ups to supporting firms and sectors with high growth potential. But that change was ordered by the Scottish Government more than five years ago, so people should have got used to it by now.

What the line in the Our Islands Our Future document indicates is a lack of faith in HIE, particularly among councillors in the Western Isles down the years, is still an issue.

They have long believed the Western Isles, with their economic problems and continuing depopulation, lose out while HIE spends money in areas where it is not so necessary, particularly around Inverness.

It was 15 years ago when the late vice convener of the Western Isles Council Angus Graham summed it up: "The current investment pattern, whereby a business seeking to open or expand in the Golden Mile, outside Inverness, receives the same level of assistance as one seeking to establish in the Western Isles, is quite simply unfair.

"Worse than that, it does not make economic sense to continue to stoke the Inverness economy to the detriment of the rest of the area. This investment pattern is not working, or it is working to our detriment."

HIE's decision 12 years later to make its biggest single investment – £25m over five years – in the Inverness Campus project virtually on the agency's doorstep hasn't helped. While HIE has been making investments in the likes of Lochboisdale in South Uist and Arnish in Lewis, the Inverness Campus project has only intensified Hebridean suspicions of the new focus ordered by ministers in 2008.

More so when the spectre of depopulation still haunts the islands with the National Records of Scotland predicting the total population of the Outer Hebrides will decline by 11.3%, or 2,567 people, between 2010 and 2035 while the figure for Scotland will increase by 10%.

So the islands' council wants all the tools it can get to keep the people already living in the islands, particularly those who are economically active and raising families, while also attracting others. It believes the economic development agenda in the islands should be co-ordinated by one body, as an integrated public authority concept is developed. Some HIE cash would transfer, leaving the agency a strategic role across the Highlands and Islands. That's the "clarification" now being sought.