Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Another Saint Patrick's Day Parade in New York City has come and gone and still the parade organizers refuse to open it up for
more than one LGBT group to march with Irish Pride. It brought to mind others who were
banned from marching in the parades of the past. One of those people was Bernadette Devlin (now Bernadette McAliskey), a civil rights activist from Northern Ireland, outspoken in her
support of the LGBT community's right to march.
Another civil rights struggle anniversary of the Bloody Sunday that took place in Selma on March 7, 1965, has also come and gone, with President Obama speaking (and GOP leadership ignoring). Northern Ireland had its own Bloody Sunday, also known as the "Bogside Massacre," which took place in Derry, on January 30, 1972. Thirteen unarmed protestors were killed, 15 were wounded, and Devlin was there on that infamous day.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is a living symbol of that struggle for civil rights. She and her husband, Michael, were riddled with bullets in an assassination attempt in 1981, and survived. She continues to work for civil and human rights in the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (STEP), which she founded.
In August of 1969, Devlin, then 22 and the youngest member ever elected to Parliament, was in New York, honored by the Mayor John Lindsay, and given the keys to the city. One evening during that visit she traveled uptown to Harlem, and spent hours talking late into the night with an amazed and fascinated group of young members of the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party and Black Panther Party.
I was one of those young people, and I will never forget that night.
Follow me below for the rest of the story.
Here was the tough and fiery young woman who handled herself with aplomb on Meet the Press:
Bernadette Devlin on Meet The Press Aug. 24, 1969
22-year-old Irish Catholic militant and Member of the British Parliament Bernadette Devlin traveled from Northern Ireland to the U.S. in the summer of 1969. During her much-publicized visit, she appeared on MTP, received the keys to New York City from Mayor John Lindsay and was a guest on The Tonight Show.
To be honest, few of us gathered that evening to hear her speak and to have a dialogue had very much understanding of the battles going on in Ireland. We were surprised that a young (our age) white Irish woman would readily identify with our own struggles against racism in the U.S. and the independence struggle in Puerto Rico. At that point time, American Irishmen were mostly viewed as oppressive police; in fact, Nuyorican street slang dubbed them "
la jara" (from O'Hara). Much to our astonishment, this diminutive young woman from across the water identified with our troubles and went on across the country while trying to raise funds, and to soundly admonish Irish Americans in her audiences for participating in anti-black racism.
This poster quotes her words on the subject:
My people’—the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce– were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who knew 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 honor not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers. –Bernadette Devlin.
She made those feelings clear when she visited Boston.
She echoed the words of Frederick Douglass:
The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the negro. They are taught to believe that he eats the bread that belongs to them. The cruel lie is told them, that we deprive them of labor and receive the money which would otherwise make its way into their pockets. Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake.
In the brilliant 2011 documentary film produced by Lelia Doolan,
Bernadette: Notes A Political Journey, she says, "Most of my good learning on feminism came from Black American women .... That was a privilege for me, not many people here had the opportunity to have that exposure ...."
Much of her thinking at the time can be found in
The Price of My Soul. Excerpts from the book and the introduction and back cover text can be found
here.
Bernadette Devlin's book tells two stories:
The story of 'the real flesh-and-blood Bernadette'
'If you eat up all the bread at teatime, there won't be anything for breakfast...'
She tells the story of personal 'bottom-level' poverty, of her combined struggle to go to university and to look after her orphaned brothers and sisters ... of how she became involved in Civil Rights, and what happened when her people chose her as their MP ....
The story of the rage behind the Ulster riots
'You come to a factory, looking for a job, and they ask you which school you went to. If its name was "Saint Somebody", they know you are a Catholic and you don't get taken on...'
In vivid detail, she brings to life the situation which has focused world attention on the North of Ireland ... the early marches, and then the shootings, the burnings, the barricades ... how she went to America to help her people rebuild their homes ... and how she feels today ....
Devlin-McAliskey spoke at the 2013 march and commemoration for Bloody Sunday:
From the full transcript:
And I think what stood in common to all of us yesterday as we were speaking was that the deed was bad enough. The shooting of people in the street in Doire was bad enough. The failure to protect people in a football stadium was bad enough. But the worst thing that happened to people was that having done it was the lie!
To immediately, in the aftermath of doing it, to lie about it. And to consistently maintain that lie to protect the state, to protect the interest, to protect the guilty. And in order to keep that lie alive, to demonise, to vilify the innocent.
And let us remember that even today when the vast majority of the innocent have been declared innocent - which we always knew - that innocence is still denied to young Gerald Donaghey. Innocence is still denied to that young person on whose corpse soldiers planted nail bombs in his pockets so that they could say they saw them there or whatever it was they did. There has still not been a declaration of innocence for young Gerald Donaghy.
Let us also remember, and we talked about that yesterday as well, that that pattern, that pattern of the state action doing what they want, lying about the fact they did it, being able to draw in the great and the good - the media, the police, the Church, the social speakers, the powerful - to maintain the lie.
Devlin-McAliskey knows a lot about the maintaining of lies against fighters for civil rights by the state. It comes as no surprise that the people of Derry identify with the people of Ferguson.
When I saw this ...
The families of Bloody Sunday victims in Derry showed solidarity with Mike Brown and the people of Ferguson painting “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” on the iconic wall at Free Derry Corner. The people of northern Ireland know a great deal about state violence. Much love and gratitude to them for their beautiful show of solidarity.
... and then found it on Twitter, I again thought of the young Bernadette Devlin and know that she helped build that bridge between our struggles and her own.
Free Derry Wall, Ireland: 'Hands up, Don't shoot.'
#Derry #Palestine #Ferguson
http://t.co/... @intifada @MotherJones @democracynow
— @An_Phoblacht
McAliskey was
denied entry into the U.S. in 2003, which Jimmy Breslin wrote about for
Newsday in
Finding Trouble in the U.S.:
We were going for our luggage. We were in Chicago. The cheap flight takes you to New York that way. We didn't have to go through immigration, they pass you through in Dublin now. The loudspeaker calls out "McAliskey." We go up to your man and say yes, and we're immediately surrounded by three men and a woman. They grab the passports out of our hands. One of the men says to me, "We've a fax from our agents in Dublin. It says you're a potential or real threat to the United States."
She told them to look at the name on the passport, which says Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.
"I've been coming back and forth to this country for 30 years," she told them.
"You've evaded us before, but you're not going to do it now," one of the immigration people, the oldest one, said.
"Look at the passport. Read the name. I was a member of Parliament."
"What year?"
"Nineteen sixty nine."
"That made you 21 years old," one of them said. "Come on." He motioned toward an office.
I have no idea what the situation is now, but one day in the future I hope to get to thank her in person for what I have learned from her.
If that doesn't happen, let this be my thank you.