Ye are many, they are few.

Mick McGahey and Jorge Aliaga Cacho in Glasgow

By Jorge Aliaga Cacho.

I had the high honor of having met Mick McGahey, leader of the British miners, a man who throughout his life fought for the interests of his class. Fate gave me the opportunity to form with him the same communist cell in Edinburgh. We used to meet at the Postal Workers Club in Leith. He was the owner of a thick voice, with dancing eyes, I remember him with a shot of whiskey in one hand and a smoky pipe in the other. McGahey would also visit Peña Jananti in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, the Latin American Centre where some social events for communist party funds were held. The photo that accompanies this note surprised us at a communist party conference held in Glasgow. Mick was owner of a combative, cultured and unmistakable oratory through which it used to raise to its feet the fighting spirit of the workers like it did during the 1984-85 miner's strike when 'he brought an audience from Dundee to its feet stamping and cheering by ending a wonderful speech with a quote from Shelley':

'Rise like lions after slumber,

In an unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew,

Which in sleep hath fallen on you'.

Ye are many, they are few.

Shelly.

'Mick McGahey was a good man. A very good man. As good a man as any deserving to be included in a 20th-century pantheon of Great Scots. Michael McGahey was arguably the best of the Scottish working class in that century', said John McAllion at his funeral.

Mick McGahey was not solely a communist interested with the classics of Marxism he also loved poetry. I remember the story told by one of my students: She went to visit him to his house and at the end of her visit she came out with a bag full of books of literature. I was very sorry to hear that Mick had passed away. I attended his funeral where the eulogy by John McAllion was delivered. Hundreds of people in a rainy day of February went to say good bye to one of the greatest Scotts of all times. Among the multitude I saw a young politician walking on the rain, wrapped in his black coat towards McGahey´s tumb to pay his final respect. That young fellow signified the continuation of the struggle lighted up by McGagey during all his life. The young fellow was Colin Fox who in subsequent political elections won a seat in the Scottish Parliament on the Scottish Socialist Party bench. Mick McGagey was a member of The Communist Party of Scotland a party that raised the flags for Scottish independence.