Rebel women: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

In January 1972, Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey) crossed the floor of the House of Commons to punch Tory home secretary Reginald Maudling. The day before, Bernadette had been about to give a speech to a peaceful Catholic civil rights march in Derry when the British army opened fire killing 13 people.

Maudling told parliament the army was acting in self-defence.

Bernadette’s action that day encapsulates her courageous and lifelong commitment to Irish freedom socialism. 

Bernadette later told Socialist Worker, “The fact of it was, though, that Maudling lied in his teeth. I accused him of lying—but you’re not allowed to call ministers liars. So I was asked to leave the House, and as I walked past, I hit him.

“Once we came past Bloody Sunday there was nothing I did not believe the British government was capable of. Any illusions I had that it was anything other than a murdering machine were gone at that stage.”

Bernadette forged her internationalist politics in that struggle against the occupation of Ireland and British establishment. 

She grew up in a poor working-class Catholic household in County Tyrone. Her family lived in poverty after the death of her father. Her mother died when Bernadette was 19, leaving her to help raise her five siblings while studying at Queen’s University Belfast.

By 1968, she was a prominent leader of the student-led civil rights organisation, People’s Democracy (PD). The university expelled her for her activism.

On New Year’s Day 1969, the PD organised a march from Belfast to Derry, modelled on Martin Luther King Jnr’s march to Washington.  

The PD’s role in the struggle paved the way for Bernadette to be elected to the House of Commons. In April 1969, Bernadette was elected MP for Mid Ulster. At 21, she was the youngest ever female MP at the time.  

In August 1969, Bernadette was sentenced to six months in prison for her role in the Battle of the Bogside. This was a three-day uprising triggered by a provocative march by the Protestant Apprentice Boys through the deprived streets of the Catholic Bogside. 

Socialist Eamonn McCann recalled that “The days when the people of the Bogside were willing to take it lying down were long gone. We can make all the criticisms we like. But this was an uprising of working class people who had been scorned all their lives.”

Immediately after the Battle of the Bogside, Bernadette went to the United States to campaign with the Black Panthers.

While she was away, Unionist politician Stratton Mills goaded Bernadette as “nothing less than Fidel Castro in a miniskirt”. 

When she returned to Ireland, she was active on picket lines and in the civil rights struggle.

Bernadette stood again as an electoral candidate in 1979. Her platform was based on supporting the Republican prisoners and their blanket protest in Long Kesh prison. 

Bernadette survived an assassination attempt in January 1981 when gunmen in the Ulster Defence Association attacked her and her husband, shooting Bernadette nine times. British troops simply watched it happen and refused to intervene. 

At the time, the Guardian reported that she was “very seriously ill”. Undeterred, in September the same year she toured Europe to raise support for the 1981 hunger strike. 

The authorities immediately deported her from Spain, but then she flew to France to rally support in French trade unions and advocate for a boycott of British goods. 

Bernadette was unsuccessful in her attempts to be elected to the Irish parliament in 1982. 

Outspoken as ever, she slammed the media as “curs and dogs” at the funeral of the Irish National Liberation Army’s former chief of staff Dominic McGlinchy in 1994.

“May every one of them rot in hell – they have taken away Dominic McGlinchy’s character and they will stand judgement for it. He was the finest Republican of them all,” she blazed.

In 1997, she founded the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme to advocate for migrant workers. 

Her political activism has continued. In 2016, she was an election agent for Eamonn McCann’s when he stood for People before Profit – he was elected.

In her own words to Socialist Worker, Bernadette “was always very clear about the things that I believed in and the things that I stood for. And I always saw myself as representing them (the citizens of Mid Ulster)—that’s why I wasn’t a very good parliamentarian. I didn’t believe those ideas were negotiable—they weren’t negotiable for me.”

Bernadette nearly paid the highest price for her commitment to the struggle of Irish liberation and socialism.