Josephine Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin; born 23 April 1947), usually known as Bernadette Devlin or Bernadette McAliskey, is an Irish civil rights leader and former politician. She served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster in Northern Ireland from a 1969 by-election until February 1974. McAliskey came to national and international prominence at the age of 21 when she became the youngest woman ever (at that time) to become a British Member of Parliament. McAliskey broke with the traditional Irish republican policy of abstentionism and took her seat in Westminster.
McAliskey's term as an MP began at the outbreak of the Troubles, the ethno-nationalist conflict which would come to dominate Northern Ireland for the next 30 years. For the majority of that time, McAliskey was politically active, advocating for a 32-county socialist Irish republic to replace the two states on the island of Ireland. Originally linked to the People's Democracy group, McAliskey was later a founder of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. However, McAliskey left the party after a year when members voted that its paramilitary wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, did not have to obey the political wing.
McAliskey continued to be politically active, such as during the 1981 Irish hunger strike. It was during this period when she and her husband survived an assassination attempt by undercover members of the Ulster Defence Association, an Ulster loyalist paramilitary. She was shot nine times by gunmen in front of her children before being taken by helicopter to hospital for emergency treatment.
Since 1997 McAliskey has worked as the head of the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme, an NGO based in Dungannon which focuses on community development.
Devlin was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, to a Catholic family, where she was the third of six children born to John James and Elizabeth Bernadette Devlin. Her father raised her to hold Irish Republican ideals before he died when Bernadette was nine years old. Subsequently, the family had to depend on welfare to survive, an experience which affected Bernadette deeply. Bernadette's mother died when Bernadette was nineteen years old, leaving her to partially raise her siblings while also attending university.
She attended St Patrick's Girls Academy in Dungannon. She was studying psychology at Queen's University Belfast in 1968 when she took a prominent role in a student-led civil rights organisation, People's Democracy. Following complaints from Unionist politicians, Devlin's scholarship was revoked and she was refused to be allowed to sit her final exams. Queen's University has never offered a formal apology to Devlin, but Devlin has stated she would not accept one even if it was offered.
She stood unsuccessfully against James Chichester-Clark in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election. When George Forrest, the MP for Mid Ulster, died, she fought the subsequent by-election on the "Unity" ticket, defeating the Ulster Unionist Party candidate, Forrest's widow Anna, and was elected to the Westminster Parliament. Aged 21, she was the youngest MP at the time, and remained the youngest woman ever elected to Westminster until the May 2015 general election when 20-year-old Mhairi Black was elected.
Devlin stood on the slogan "I will take my seat and fight for your rights" – signalling her rejection of the traditional Irish republican principle of abstentionism. On 22 April 1969, the day before her 22nd birthday, she swore the Oath of Allegiance and made her maiden speech within an hour.
In June 1969, in an interview published by the Italian weekly l'Opinione, Devlin described People's Democracy as a movement seeking to organise the working class across religious divisions. She stated that it was neither an instrument of the IRA nor immediately aimed at Irish reunification. She stressed the need to extend the mobilisation for civil rights and social justice to the Protestant working class, and said that she sought to contribute to the building of a socialist society while rejecting doctrinaire socialism.
After engaging, on the side of the residents, in the Battle of the Bogside in August, she was convicted of incitement to riot in December 1969, for which she served six months imprisonment. After being re-elected at the 1970 general election, Devlin declared that she would sit in Parliament as an independent socialist.
US tour and meetings with Black Panthers
Almost immediately after the Battle of the Bogside, Devlin undertook a tour of the United States in August 1969, a trip which generated a significant amount of media attention. She met with members of the Black Panther Party in Watts, Los Angeles and gave them her support. She made appearances on Meet the Press and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. At a number of speaking events, she made parallels between the struggle in the US by African Americans seeking civil rights and Catholics in Northern Ireland, sometimes to the embarrassment of her audience. During an event in Philadelphia, she had to goad an African American singer to sing "We Shall Overcome" to the Irish-American audience, many of whom refused to stand for the song. In Detroit, she refused to take the stage until African Americans, who were barred from the event, were allowed in. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay arranged a ceremony to present Devlin with a key to the city of New York. Devlin, frustrated with conservative elements of the Irish-American community, left the tour to return to Northern Ireland and, believing the freedom of New York should go to the American poor, sent Eamonn McCann to present the key on her behalf to a representative from the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party.
In September 1969, while still on tour, the Unionist Stratton Mills dubbed Devlin "nothing less than Fidel Castro in a miniskirt". Devlin responded by stating that Mills was a coward for waiting until she was abroad to make such a remark, but also that she was "as left as James Connolly and the starry plough". The two had a face-to-face debate in New York that month.
Having witnessed the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972, Devlin was infuriated that she was later consistently denied the floor in the House of Commons by the Speaker Selwyn Lloyd, despite the fact that parliamentary convention decreed that any Member of Parliament witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it.
The day following Bloody Sunday, Devlin slapped Conservative Home Secretary Reginald Maudling across the face when he falsely asserted in the House of Commons that the Parachute Regiment had fired in self-defence on Bloody Sunday. Asked if she intended to apologise to Maudling, Devlin said: "I'm just sorry I didn't get him by the throat".
Thirteen years later, former British Prime Minister Edward Heath recalled the event: "I remember very well when an Hon. Lady rushed from the Opposition Benches and hit Mr. Maudling. I remember that vividly because I thought that she was going to hit me. She could not stretch as far as that, so she had to make do with him."
Devlin appeared on Firing Line in 1972 to discuss the situation in Northern Ireland. In the same year she campaigned for a 'No' vote in the referendum regarding the Republic of Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community.
Irish Republican Socialist Party