Politics

Great Scots: Interview by Kenneth Roy

3 July 2011 · Bob Smith

Great Scots:
Interview by
Kenneth Roy

Great Scots:
Twelve faces of
the last 25 years

Great Scots:

Mick McGahey

Great Scots:
A selection of
nominations by readers

Great Scots:

Winnie Ewing

Rear Window

Mick McGahey
with Kenneth Roy

‘What kind of man was your father?’
     I expected Mick McGahey to express some judgement about his father’s temperament or character. Instead he defined him – as he defined the rest of his family – according to
politics or religion.
     ‘Oh, very active. He was a foundation member of the Communist Party, and exerted a tremendous influence on me. My two brothers were also members of the party. My sister, no – she
was a devout Catholic. As was my mother.’
     ‘Your father wasn’t a Catholic?’
     ‘No, no. He was what you term an old-time atheist! He wasn’t anti-religious, he respected people’s religion, but he was what he used to call a gross materialist. But not in the materialistic
sense!’
     ‘You were poor?’
     ‘There were no rich miners. The weekly wage of the miner in the 1930s was 50 bob for six days a week, and sometimes you didn’t get six days a week, you only got three. You could depend on it that on the Thursday night there was nothing left in the cupboard. My mother used to say, "This is the day before tomorrow". And yet it wasn’t cruel, bitter poverty. Not
the grinding poverty of colonial peoples, or anything like that. But it was poverty all the same. The north ward in Cambuslang had the highest tuberculosis rate in western Europe – including Franco’s Spain, as we always used to emphasise.’

From Conversations in a Small Country, 1989

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The Holiday Banner
Vatersay, Western Isles, on a summer evening two years ago. Islay McLeod took the photograph on her way back from
a ceilidh

Twelve faces