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'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.
Devlin was studying Psychology at the 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, 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 widespread discrimination against Roman Catholics 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 is widely marked as the beginning of Northern Ireland's thirty year "Troubles". She served a short jail term.^[1] 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 and was later infuriated that she was 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.^[2]
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.^[3]
She was temporarily suspended from Parliament as a result of the incident.^[4]
In 1971 while still unmarried, she gave birth to a daughter, Roisin, which 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.^[5]
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.^[6] 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'' (''see articles on Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan'') 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 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.^[7] 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 seriously wounded by Loyalist terrorists who broke into their remote County Tyrone home. British soldiers who were watching the McAliskey home at the time neglected to prevent the assassination attempt.^[8] It was a British Army doctor who subsequently saved their lives, albeit under circumstances that many, including the McAliskeys, found suspicious, and thus they were less than expressive in their "gratitude" to the soldiers involved.
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.^[9] Her daughter Róisín was arrested (while four months pregnant) in 1996 on an extradition warrant issued by Germany accusing her of involvement in an Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing.^[10] After a long campaign in which her mother took a leading role by gathering support from Irish and American citizens, the British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, vetoed the extradition on health grounds. Róisin eventually gave birth to a healthy daughter, Loinnir McCotter.^[11] 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.^[12]
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". 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.^[13]
On 21 May, 2007 McAliskey's daughter Roisin was arrested on a European arrest warrant, again for her alleged involvement in the bombing of Osnabruck army barracks. Roisin was released on bail of £2,500 and was due to attend an extradition hearing in June 2007.^[14]

Contents

References

External links

References

1. 1970: Violence flares as Devlin is arrested
2. Daughters of Ireland Ros Wynne-Jones
3. 1969: Devlin is youngest-ever woman MP
4. Bloody Sunday: the ghosts that won't lie down David McKittrick
5. Devlin is 'very ill' after shooting The Guardian 17 January 1981
6. INLA Deadly Divisions, , , Holland, Jack & McDonald, Henry, Poolbeg, ,
7. Northern Ireland and the European Parliament Nicholas Whyte
8. Loyalists, , Peter, Taylor, Bloomsbury Publishing, ,
9. Elections Ireland: Bernadette McAliskey
10. Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment: Detention of Róisín McAliskey
11. IRA suspect 'too ill' to be extradited
12. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to the United States 22 February 2003
13. éirígí Árd Fheis 2007
14. McAliskey bailed over extradition

External links

★ ''The Price of My Soul'', 1969 (Foreword and Chapter Twelve)

★ 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)

★ Interview by Peter Standford, published in the Independent on Sunday: 29 July 2007: [1]