The following week, during a Parliamentary debate at Westminster, MacAliskey called Reginald
Maudling, then English Home Secretary, a 'lying hypocrite' when he said that the soldiers
in Derry had fired in self-defence. She then crossed the floor of the House of Commons and
struck him.
In February, 1974 MacAliskey contested the Westminster election as an independent socialist
but lost her seat. In the same year she co-founded the Irish Republican Socialist Party
from which she resigned in 1975.
In January, 1981 MacAliskey was shot and seriously wounded by Loyalist paramilitaries.
She was on the H-Block Hunger-Strike Committee of 1980-1981.
Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey is one of the most articulate speakers in Ireland and such is the strength of her oratory that throughout
the 1980's and 1990's she was subject to the most severe media censorship in Ireland and in England.
In 1996 her pregnant daughter, Roisin, was arrested, interrogated for 6 days in Castlereagh
interrogation centre and falsely accused of being part of an IRA cell in Germany. Roisin was
imprisoned on remand as a Category A prisoner in Belmarsh Prison, London, an all-male high-security
prison with no female facilities. She was frequently strip-searched and moved between Holloway and
Belmarsh prisons until she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital where she gave birth to a daughter.
Roisin MacAliskey was eventualy released in March, 1998, 'due to ill-health'.
Today Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey work with immigrants in County Tyrone.
This extract is from
Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey's The Price of
My Soul (1969).©
Londonderry, traditionally called simply Derry, is the flash point of Northern Ireland.
Because of the Siege of Londonderry in 1689 - when the citizens inside the walls held out
against the Catholic besiegers for 105 days before help came - it has enormous emotional
value as a symbol to the Protestants, but it also has among the worst records in housing,
employment and political manipulation in the whole country. It is a place where passions
don't need much to be aroused, and the Minister for Home Affairs, Mr William Craig, banned
the march [scheduled for October 5th, 1968]. The reaction to the ban showed how far
people's resignation had begun to crack. In the past when things were banned, you
complained, you sulked, and you went home. More people turned up to the Derry march
because it was banned than would have come than if the government had
done nothing about it. The silence was beginning to be broken.
I went to Derry on October 5 and found there an atmosphere that the city had never had
before. Ordinarily Derry is a dead city: about one in five of the men is unemployed and
the whole feeling of the place is depressed. But it was electric that day. You could see
it on people's faces - excitement, or alarm, or anger. Derry was alive. My friends and I
didn't know where the march was beginning, and we were afraid to ask, in case we asked the
wrong person and got clobbered for our trouble. But we found it in the end and started
off.
We hadn't got more than a couple of hundred yards up the street when we were stopped by
masses of police. There were a few scuffles. The police took our banners away and knocked a
few people over the head. Gerry Fitt had been injured and nobody knew what had happened to
him. Once again the organizers decided to hold a meeting. There was no platform this time,
but someone produced a chair, and Betty Sinclair got up on it, said her piece about its
being a peaceful march, and suggested we should all go home. It works the first time, and
the second, and perhaps the third but finally people say, 'We didn't come here to go home,'
and all hell breaks loose. People were shouting, 'If you don't want to get through, get out
of the way!' and the mood was getting uglier. Here was no carnival atmosphere and these
weren't people who had come out for the fun of something new. These were men who had no
work, these were the real men of no property. Their grievances were genuine, and the more
the police stopped them from marching, the more bitter they became.
Then Eamonn McCann got up on the chair. This was the first time I'd seen him and he was a
legendary figure to me. His escapades at Queen's had gone down in the university annals,
and as a result of them he had been sent down. He was a weird mixture of irresponsibility
and responsible, original, intelligent political thought. He put it to the marchers that
they had three choices: they could go home, they could hold a meeting there, or they could
walk into the police cordon until each successive row was beaten into the ground. 'There's
no point in standing here and screaming,' he said. 'Decide rationally what you are going to
do, and organise to do it.'
The police knew that Eamonn was the real threat - he was turning a mob into an nonviolent
force. So they charged.
I had been watching the police and I'd seen them filter down both sides of the march, so
that now they encircled us. When we turned to go back down the street and re-form, we found
we were trapped. There were policemen to the right and the left, to the fore and the aft,
and they just moved in on all four sides, with truncheons and heels and boots, and beat
everybody off the street. Then the water cannons came out and hosed the streets. Quite
deliberately they hosed in upstairs windows and shop fronts, and they went right across
Craigavon Bridge, hosing all the onlookers. The police just went mad.
Derry was on every newspaper in Ireland, every newspaper in Britain. It was being flashed
on every television screen in the world...
And Ireland was up in arms: you can slowly crush the Irish, you can take the ground from
under their feet and they won't notice they're sinking down; but if you hit them, they will
hit back. So the Unionist government did the civil-rights movement a favour. They gave it
life in one day. Without the police, it would have taken much longer to get off the
ground.
© Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008
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