|
Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (born 23 April 1947, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland), also known as Bernadette Devlin and Bernadette McAliskey, is a Socialist republican political activist. She served as a Member of Parliament at Westminster from 1969 to 1974 for the Mid Ulster constituency. 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 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, she was 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 Irish republican tactic of abstentionism (being absent from Westminster). She made her maiden speech on her 22nd birthday, rather unconventionally within an hour of taking her seat. She remains the youngest woman ever to have been elected to British parliament. Her 1969 book, The Price of My Soul, did much to publicise widespread discrimination against Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. Her radical left-wing politics resulted in conviction of incitement to riot in December 1969. She had actively engaged, on the side of the residents, in the 'Battle of the Bogside', which 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 witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday. She was later infuriated that she was consistently 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. 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 stating that the British Army had fired only in self-defence. She was temporarily suspended from Parliament as a result of the incident. In 1971, while still unmarried, she gave birth to a daughter Róisin. This cost her some support in conservative Roman Catholic areas. She married Michael McAliskey on April 23, 1973, which was her 26th birthday. 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 paralleled 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. [ citation needed ] She attacked the Peace People (see articles on Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan ) as dishonest in 1976. [ citation needed ] In 1977, she joined the Independent Socialist Party, but it disbanded the following year. 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 publicly critical of Gerry Adams and other Sinn Féin leaders. [ citation needed ] On February 16, 1981, she and her husband were shot by Loyalist terrorists who broke into their remote County Tyrone home. British soldiers were watching the McAliskey home at the time, but neglected to prevent the assassination attempt. It was a British Army doctor who subsequently saved their lives. [ citation needed ] In 1982, she twice failed in an attempt to be elected to the Dublin North Central constituency of the Dáil Éireann, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland. Her daughter Róisin has been arrested twice in high profile cases. Her younger daughter, Deirdre McAliskey, is also politically active, most recently as a student leader at QUB. 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. 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". [ citation needed ] She has occasionally spoken at public meetings organised by Fourthwrite, a journal supported by dissident republicans, socialists, and ex-prisoners and on 12 May 2007 she was guest speaker at éirígí's first Annual James Connolly commemoration in Arbour Hill, Dublin.
|
