When I was travelling through Ireland – and loving every minute of it! – I was fascinated by Ireland’s political history, which often left me fuming at the injustices that were perpetrated by the British state. What infuriates me the most is that people assume that Britain has improved – that Ireland’s history is just a blot of the UK’s otherwise clean slate that should be glanced at and quickly forgotten. I was really pleased to see that the Free Derry museum had been opened my Mozzam Begg – an ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee. Apparently the similarities in the torture methods used on Mozzam and those used on IRA prisoners in British-run prisons were frightening. What this trip has left me with is a sense that all struggles are one. Whether it be the fight for Irish Independence, or the struggle for the recognition of a Palestinian State, or the struggles of oppressed minorities across the world for equal rights – in all cases a group of people are told that they are worthless and that they deserve less than others. And in all cases people rise up and demand their rights. I just wish so many amazing people did not die in this process.
Anyway, to the subject of my post. I’ve decided to start a new category – “amazing women throughout history”, because the more I learn about this world, the more I am struck by some of the incredible women who have shaped history and perhaps gained less recognition than their male counterparts. So read on and be amazed by the wonderful Bernadette Devlin – in her own words “I am a feminist a socialist and a republican.”
Bernadette Devlin
Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was born on 23 April 1947, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
Devlin studied Psychology at Queen’s University in Belfast in 1968 where she was a prominent member of the radical student-led civil rights political party called the People’s Democracy – which led to her expulsion from university.
A civil rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968 was “the beginning of it all. I can still see, in my mind, the absolute hatred on the faces of police officers. My understanding of the society I was in was irrevocably changed.” It had been organised by the newly formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, to protest at discrimination against Catholics. “This was a pent-up hatred. This was naked violence. This was three or four men with long cudgels standing over someone on the ground and hitting and hitting them. This was police following those who had dragged away the injured, and beating them up as well. This was a realisation that your worst enemy was in a uniform and had the power to kill you.”
Devlin then began her venture into the murky world of Westminster politics. She opposed James Chichester-Clark in the Northern Ireland general election of 1969. When George Forrest, the MP for Mid Ulster, died, she fought the subsequent by-election on the “Unity” ticket, defeating a female Unionist candidate, Forrest’s widow Anna, and was elected to the Westminster Parliament. By this point Devlin was still only 21 and became the youngest MP ever to serve in the British parliament and the constituency of Mid-Ulster received a record voter turnout of 91.5%.
Bernadette, however, took an anarchist-style perspective to her role as a politician, saying “basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I’ve allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.”
Devlin was part of the “Battle of the Bogside,” which occurred after the Protestant and Unionist Apprentice Boys’ Parade in Derry on August 12, 1969. The riot involved taking control of the Bogside (traditionally working class and Catholic area of Derry) and erecting barricades to exclude a police force of decided bias from the area. Devlin was a central figure in urging the construction of the barricades and encouraging their defenders.
Bernadette made her maiden speech in Westminster on her 22nd birthday, rather unconventionally within an hour of taking her seat. Here’s an excerpt in which she is replying to the Member for Londonderry (Mr. Chichester Clark):
“I had never hoped to see the day when I might agree with someone who represents the bigoted and sectarian Unionist Party, which uses a deliberate policy of dividing the people in order to keep the ruling minority in power and to keep the oppressed people of Ulster oppressed. I never thought I could see the day when I should agree with any phrase uttered by the representative of such a party, but the Hon. Gentleman summed up the situation ‘to a t.’ He referred to stark, human misery. That is what I saw in Bogside. It has been there for fifty years – and that same stark human misery is to be found in the Protestant Fountain area, which the Hon. Gentleman would claim to represent.”
After the Battle of Bogside, Bernadette travelled to the United States and met with the Secretary General of the United Nations. She was given the keys to the city of New York — and handed them over to the Black Panther Party.
“I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. ’My people’ — the people who know about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who know about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil-rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York, I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honour not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.”
On her return to Ireland, in December 1969, Bernadette was convicted of incitement to riot in the Battle of Bogside and she served a short jail term after being re-elected to government.
Bernadette witnessed the events of the Bloody Sunday Massacre, at which twenty-seven civil rights protesters were shot by the British Army Parachute Regiment during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march. Thirteen people, seven of whom were teenagers, died immediately, while the death of another person 4½ months later has been attributed to the injuries he received on the day. The massacre began just as Bernadette began to speak to the rally.
In the aftermath of the event, Devlin was repeatedly denied the chance to speak in Parliament, although parliamentary convention decreed that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it in Parliament. When State Secretary for the Home Department, Reginald Maudling, made a statement to Parliament on Bloody Sunday saying that the British Army had fired only in self-defence, Bernadette furiously punched him in the face, yelling “Murderous hypocrite!” As she later wryly remarked, “It wasn’t long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.”
Bernadette’s prominent role is politics certainly ruffled some feathers. “People here said, ‘Confine yourself to our issues. And please cut your hair and lengthen your skirt. And don’t smoke.’” Protestants were critical of her and referred to her as a “Fidel Castro in a miniskirt.” In 1971, while still unmarried, she gave birth to a daughter Róisin. She married Michael McAliskey in April 1973 and lost her seat in Parliament in 1974. They were among the founders of the Irish Republican Socialist Party in 1974.
Bernadette recalls that this point “was when the civil rights movement ended and the armed struggle began. That was the point of realisation for me that the penalty for demanding equal rights in your society was that your government would kill you. Then you say, ‘If it’s OK for the government to declare war on the people, the people have a right to declare war on the government.’”
She stood as an independent candidate in support of the prisoners on the blanket protest and dirty protest at Long Kesh prison in the 1979 elections to the European Parliament in Northern Ireland, and won 5.9% of the vote. She was a leading spokesperson for the Smash H-Block Campaign, which supported the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike in 1980 and 1981, though she remained critical of Gerry Adams and other Sinn Féin leaders.
On 16 January 1981, she and her husband were shot by Ulster Freedom Fighters paramilitaries who broke into their remote County Tyrone home. British soldiers were watching the McAliskey home at the time, but failed to prevent the assassination attempt – whether by choice or accident is unknown. Michael was shot twice. She was hit in the chest, arm and thigh as she went to wake up one of the three children.
In more recent years, when there has been relative peace in Northern Ireland Bernadette has been a powerful, if private, force in various social issues. In 1997 she helped found the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (Step), the network of groups and campaigners she directs from Dungannon, which currently focuses on improving the lives of migrant workers. “We don’t confine ourselves to one area, such as housing, or legal rights, or water charges – we research and campaign across them all.”
“People have said, ‘You were with us; now you’re with the foreigners.’ I say, ‘No. I am doing the same thing I have always done. It’s still about people having a right to fulfil their potential and not be excluded from that because of other people’s prejudice.’”
“I think there are two perceptions – the perception of me from the outside which sees the north of Ireland as ‘them’ and ‘us’, Catholics and Protestants, and me therefore as part of one side. And then there is the perception here, on the inside, which is more complex and sees me not as Catholic, but rather as a socialist, a feminist and someone who has had nothing to do with the Catholic Church for 30 years except to criticise it. I’m therefore an outsider and I don’t think it is any accident that I have found myself working with people on the margins.”
In 2003, she was barred from entering the United States and deported on the grounds that the State Department had declared that she “poses a serious threat to the security of the United States”, although she protested that she had no terrorist involvement — hinging ostensibly on her conviction for incitement to riot in 1969 — but had been permitted to frequently travel to the United States in the past.
“When I was younger, the anger was all from the heart up. It came from my heart and it came out of my mouth. The anger has not gone away. Anger is deep-seated. It’s not all right. But it’s not personalised anger. People ask me about the things they think are most important. And I say – which is what I feel – Bloody Sunday was not by any stretch of the imagination the worst thing that happened to me. It was the worst thing that happened to others – the families in Derry, for instance. If you say, ‘What is the worst thing that happened to me?’ then 1969 to 1999 is the worst thing that happened to me and lots of other people who lived through that period. Thirty years of my life is the worst thing that happened to me. And that doesn’t get better.”
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadette_Devlin_McAliskey
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/bernadette-mcaliskey-return-of-the-roaring-girl-951825.html
