Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (born
April 23,
1947, in
County Tyrone,
Northern Ireland, to a Catholic nationalist family), also known as
Bernadette Devlin and
Bernadette McAliskey, is a
Northern Ireland republican political activist. She served as a
Member of Parliament at Westminster from
1969 to
1974 for the
Mid Ulster constituency, and is a leading critic of the
Good Friday Agreement.
Devlin was studying
Psychology at the
Queen's University of Belfast in
1968 when she took a prominent role in a student-led
civil rights political party called
People's Democracy. 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 at the age of 21, becoming the
youngest MP at the time. She stood on the slogan "I will take my seat and fight for your rights" - signalling her rejection of the traditional republican tactic of
abstentionism, and she made her
maiden speech on her 22nd birthday, rather unconventionally doing so within an hour of taking her seat.
She remains the youngest woman ever to have been elected to the British parliament. Her 1969 book,
The Price of My Soul, did much to publicise the claims of Roman Catholics about discrimination in
Northern Ireland.
Her radical left-wing politics resulted in conviction of incitement to riot in December 1969 because she had actively engaged, on the side of the residents, in the '
Battle of the Bogside' which followed that year's
Apprentice Boys march and is widely marked as the beginning of Northern Ireland's 30 year "
troubles". She served a short jail term. After being re-elected in the
1970 general election, Devlin declared that she would sit in Parliament as an Independent Socialist.
Devlin punched
Reginald Maudling, the
Secretary of State for the Home Department in the
Conservative government, when he made a statement to Parliament on
Bloody Sunday supporting the
British Army line that it had fired only in self-defence. Devlin had witnessed the event and was infuriated that she had been consistently denied the chance to speak, although parliamentary convention decreed that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it in Parliament. She was suspended from Parliament for six months.
She married Michael McAliskey, by whom she had become pregnant in
1971, on
April 23,
1973, which was her 26th birthday; her out of wedlock pregnancy had cost her some support in the conservative Catholic area. In the
February 1974 general election she was opposed by other Nationalist candidates and lost her seat.
McAliskey helped to form the
Irish Republican Socialist Party in
1974, this was a revolutionary socialist breakaway from
Official Sinn Féin and parallelled the
Irish National Liberation Army's split from the
Official Irish Republican Army. She served on the party's national executive in 1975, but she left the party after a short time when it became clear that it regarded political activity as subordinate to the INLA. She attacked the
Peace People as dishonest in
1976. In 1977, she joined the
Independent Socialist Party, but it disbanded the following year.
She stood as an
independent candidate in support of the blanketmen 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 publicly critical of
Gerry Adams and other
Sinn Féin leaders. On
February 16,
1981, she and her husband were shot and very seriously wounded, apparently by
loyalists who broke into their remote
County Tyrone home and shot them many times including in the head, but, ironically, the British Army saved their lives, albeit under circumstances that certain nationalists, including the McAliskeys, found suspicious, and thus they were less than expressive in their "gratitude" to the soldiers in question.
In
1982 she failed in her attempt to be elected to
Dáil Éireann, the parliament of the
Republic of Ireland. Her daughter Róisín was arrested (while five months pregnant) in
1996 on an extradition warrant issued by
Germany accusing her of involvement in an
Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing. After a long campaign in which her mother took a leading role by gathering support from Irish and U.S. citizens, the Home Secretary
Jack Straw vetoed the extradition on health grounds, and Róisin eventually gave birth to a healthy daughter, Loinnir McCotter. Her younger daughter, Deirdre McAliskey, is also politically active, most recently as a student leader at QUB.
McAliskey remains an active commentator and activist on the margins of Northern Irish politics, where she has expressed strong opposition to the
Good Friday Agreement and to
Sinn Féin's entry into government in
Northern Ireland stating that IRA volunteers had not died to create "a common teaching qualification".
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 but had been permitted to frequently travel to the
United States in the past. She has sometimes spoken at public meetings organised by
Fourthwrite, a journal supported by dissident republicans, socialists, and ex-prisoners.
*
The Price of My Soul, 1969 (Foreword and Chapter Twelve)
*
Devlin is 'very ill' after shooting - 17 Jan 1981 (by David Beresford in Belfast, The Guardian)
*
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to the United States - 22 Feb 2003, (by Laura Flanders)
* THE BLANKET:
Knowing Too Much and Saying It Too Well: Bernadette McAliskey Barred from US - 23 Feb 2003, (by Anthony McIntyre)
* Ireland's OWN: Women Freedom Fighters:
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, (by DM Gould, Ireland's OWN)
