An Irishwoman's Diary

‘SCARGILL.” Say it with emphasis, Lady Thatcher-style, and then say it again. She could never have imbued McQuillan with quite the same venomous ring.

Not many recall that Arthur Scargill never actually met his nemesis, the former British prime minister – and not many know that he could have passed himself off as a McQuillan if he had. His father Harold was born out of wedlock and took his mother’s surname; his younger siblings took the patronymic McQuillan, being the surname of their dad.

Confusing? Not really, as Scargill explains, sitting in a hotel lobby in Galway. The former National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader is now 72, fit and healthy, and has more time to pursue his Irish roots then way back when. “When” was that decade and a bit from 1974 to 1985 during which one prime minister – Edward Heath – departed, while another, Margaret Thatcher, rode out the second miners’ strike.

On a visit to Dublin, in late April 1985, Scargill refused to talk about defeat. He was asked about Drogheda roots. “I shall leave that to the capitalist newspapers,” he growled. An RTÉ reporter asked if he was resigning as NUM president.

“You did promise you wouldn’t ask silly questions,” was his response.

Journalists weren't exactly his favourite company, for good reason. He had survived several smears, had been portrayed as Ghadaffi groupie, a megalomaniac and a Stalinist threat. One newspaper reportedly hired a psychiatrist to study his mental condition. His distinctive hairstyle was also a focus of attention for the Daily Mailas this newspaper's London correspondent David McKittrick recounted then in a profile of the "incorruptible" figure who had started working in a coalmine when he was just 15.

“Arthur is bald but will not admit it,”McKittrick wrote in June 1984, just over six months after 180,000 miners downed tools, and their union leader had become a master of the “flying picket”. Scargill “spends a great deal of time and effort carefully preparing and arranging his hair-do so that a very long piece on the left-hand side can be persuaded to stretch right across to the other . . . Now, we all have our little vanities,”McKittrick added, noting that this particular one had really done Scargill “no harm at all”.

Somewhat mellower and with a similar hairstyle, Scargill is quite happy to talk about his antecedents to this representative of the “capitalist press”. He has traced his family tree back to his great-grandparents, who came from Drogheda, via Antrim, and the north-west. His great-grandmother was a Rafferty who left Donegal during the Great Famine years.

The McQuillans on his father’s side had links with Antrim’s Dunluce Castle. “That Scottish chieftain McDonnell took it while they were busy fighting down south,” he says, referring to Sorley Boy McDonnell, also known as “Yellow Charlie”, who seized it in a battle in 1565. “I think it’s about time we got it back!”

Scargill investigated a claim to Irish citizenship, but found it didn’t apply beyond his grandparents’ generation. Still, he feels at home here, he says, visits often, and is frequently approached by strangers who sent money to miners’ families during the strike.

He had one such encounter on his recent visit to Galway, when he ran into Michael O’Connor, a former manager of a prominent building society who has now moved onto greater things.

O’Connor, a Sligo man, was keen to shake Scargill’s hand. He had been on the executive of the Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA) when Job Stott was president. O’Connor told Scargill how one IBOA colleague wanted to bring some miners’ children to Cavan for a two-week holiday. He asked for some personal contributions at the conclusion of an IBOA executive meeting.

“Stott wrote a cheque for £100 without hesitation, ‘O’Connor recalled. “I gave £20 as did a few others. We heard the holiday worked out very well.” Some £10 million sterling was collected in public appeals for striking miners’ families, Scargill estimates, and about £250,000 of that was from Irish trade unions – with many more contributions from across the island. In August 1984, the then lord mayor of Dublin Mick O’Halloran declared that the citizenry would have to pay off a “70-year-old debt”.

Introducing his lord mayor’s appeal for miners’ families in the Mansion House, Cllr O’Halloran explained that the NUM had sent £1,000 a week to Dublin families during the 1913 lock-out. The lord mayor had checked, and this was the equivalent of £46,000 by then.

A quarter century later, Scargill still swears by Robert Tressel's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which his father gave him to read when he was 12. He says he feels "more radical than ever". He firmly believes right is on his side, as reflected in recent world events. "This is not a banking crisis, this is not an economic crisis, this is a crisis created by globalisation and by the disastrous policies of the EU,"he says.

He had travelled west to speak at the James Connolly Forum in Galway, and explained how the Irish and Scottish socialist leader, executed after the 1916 Rising, was dear to his beating Marxist heart. Connolly was founder in 1903 of the Socialist Labour Party which Scargill is credited with re-establishing in 1996.

Connolly would never have had the stomach for “New Labour”, and Scargill credits him with a foresight which another famous revolutionary leader lacked. “Lenin advised the British Communist Part to seek affiliation to the emerging new Labour Party in Britain. He felt this would result in a mass organisation of the working class. Connolly advised against it. Lenin was wrong, and Connolly was right.”