TRADE unionists and socialists from across Scotland have gathered at Holyrood to celebrate the centenary of a man who played a “pivotal” role in its birth — miners’ leader Michael “Mick” McGahey.

Opening the event on Wednesday evening, socialist MSP Richard Leonard highlighted that those present were meeting in the building where his ashes are interred and the Scottish Parliament he did so much to help create.

“In that seminal speech as the new leader of the Scottish miners to the STUC in Aberdeen in 1968, Michael McGahey made history,” Mr Leonard said.

“He reignited the support of the miners and the labour movement in favour of a Scottish parliament, one neither parochial nor chauvinistic.

“A workers’ parliament, with horizons which are internationalist, outward looking, forged on class, part of a worldwide movement, a movement and not a monument.”

National Union of Mineworkers president Nicky Wilson told of how Mr McGahey encouraged young trade unionists to become community activists, insisting that “when you walk out of the pit gates at the end of your shift, your responsibilities have not ended.”

Admitting that she had been “starstruck” when sharing a platform with Mr McGahey at the centenary congress in 1997, where they jointly addressed struggles past and future, then STUC youth committee chairwoman and current general secretary Roz Foyer said: “I needn’t have worried. He was the most humble, down-to-earth, welcoming, encouraging individual.”

Speaking of the headline in the Times the following day, she added: “There was a picture of Mick McGahey and I cuddling each other that took up most of the front page and it just said: ‘Old left, young left.’

“I wish the old left and young left had had more to do with that Labour government.

“Maybe we wouldn't be in the state we’re in today if we’d carried Mick McGahey’s values through those years.”