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Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (born April 23, 1947), 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, and is a critic of the Good Friday Agreement.
Devlin was studying Psychology at Queen's University 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 the MP for Mid-Ulster died, she fought the by-election on the "Unity" ticket and was elected to the Westminster Parliament at the age of 21. 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.
She is the youngest woman ever to be elected to the British parliament. Breaking with tradition she made her highly-praised maiden speech within an hour of taking her seat. Her 1969 book "The Price of My Soul" did much to publicise the claims of Catholics about discrimination in Northern Ireland.
Her radical left-wing politics ended 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 maked 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 Home Secretary 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, although parliamentary convention decreed that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it in parliament, she had been consistently denied the chance to speak.
She married Michael McAliskey, by whom she had become pregnant in 1971, on April 23, 1973; her pregnancy out of wedlock had lost her some support. 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 1975, this was a Maoist breakaway from Official Sinn Féin and parallelled the Irish National Liberation Army's split from the Official Irish Republican Army. With some others she left it 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. She stood as an independent candidate in support of the blanketmen in the Long Kesh prison in the 1979 elections to the European Parliament in Northern Ireland, and won a respectable 5.9% of the vote. She was a leading spokesperson for the Smash H-Block Campaign, which supported the hunger strikers 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 seriously wounded by unionist paramilitaries who broke into her home.
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 Irish Republican Army bombing. After a long campaign in which her mother took a leading role, the Home Secretary Jack Straw vetoed the extradition on health grounds.
Her younger daughter Deirdre is also politically active, most recently as a student leader at Queen's University in Belfast.
McAliskey remains an active commentator and activist on the margins of Northern Irish politics, where she has expressed strong opposition to the Belfast 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 Ireland.
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", though McAliskey protested that she had no terrorist involvement and had frequently traveled 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.
External links
- 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)