Ireland's OWN: Women Freedom Fighters

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
—by Míchealín Daugherty

Renowned Irish civil rights leader, and one of the founding members of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, has been a leader of the North of Ireland freedom struggle since 1968, when she was a student at Queen's University in Belfast.

In 1969, Bernadette was elected to the British Parliament from Mid—Ulster and, was at age 21, the youngest member of that body. She served in Parliament until 1974.

Bernadette found out when she visited the U.S. in the early 1970s that:

"I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. 'My people' — the people who know about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be 'my people', the Irish Americans who know 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 honour not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers."

Bernadette has also worked diligently on the plight of political prisoners in Ireland. During the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, she was a member of the National Executive Committee of the National H-Block Committee.

In January 1981, Bernadette and her husband, Mickey McAliskey, were severely wounded by three pro-British assassins who shot them in their home. They were not deterred. Bernadette continues to work to this day for civil liberties and freedom in the North of Ireland, and on human rights issues worldwide.

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Special Thanks to Jack Holland for helping me restore files missing from this page.