‘Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and STEP’ by Joe McVeigh

I have always admired Bernadette McAliskey since she first appeared on TV in 1969 when she was a spokesperson for People’s Democracy, the student civil rights group. She was a student at Queens University. I admired her courage, her eloquence and the way she could articulate the issues that concerned ordinary people from a nationalist background in the six counties. When she talked about the division in our society she was thinking first and foremost of the division that existed between the rich and poor.  She spoke a language that ordinary working class people could understand. I could identify with her because I too had come from a similar Catholic working class background in the neighbouring county of Fermanagh.

I remember the first time I saw her in person. It was in Castlederg during her election campaign in mid-Ulster in 1969. She looked very young and fragile. She was addressing a large crowd in the town square from the back of a lorry using a loud-hailer. While she was speaking, she was attacked by loyalists with stones and eggs. But she carried on speaking while ducking to avoid the missiles being hurled at her while the RUC stood idly by.

I was a student in Maynooth at that time, home for the Christmas holidays. I was active in the college history society. Our mentor was the late Tomás Ó Fiaich -later to be Cardinal and Primate of All Ireland. With his help we organised talks and discussions about the recent past from people who were making history. We invited Tom Barry of Kilmichael fame and the former Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, and others, to talk to the students about the 1916 Rising and the Tan War.

When the north erupted in 1968 we knew that something big was happening. History was being made. It was proposed that we invite someone who was prominent in this new uprising in the north to speak to the students in Maynooth. I proposed that we invite Bernadette Devlin. At that time, if you were inviting an outside speaker to the college, it was obligatory to get the permission of the President of the college. So I went to the President of Maynooth college, a man called Jeremiah Newman (later bishop of Limerick), to ask his permission to invite Bernadette to speak to the students in the college. When I asked him if it would be alright to invite Bernadette Devlin to speak in the college he almost took a seizure and made it very clear that it would not be alright because she was a communist. I suppose he thought she would corrupt the students who were training to be priests with socialist ideas. That could not be allowed to happen in Maynooth which was founded in 1795 to make sure that students for the priesthood in Irelandwould not be contaminated with radical political or theological ideas that were floating around Europe at the time.

Many years later, I got to know Bernadette personally. I have travelled with her to the USA for court hearings involving Irish prisoners. I have campaigned with her on discrimination and I have worked with her on public inquiries into killings by the British and loyalist death squads in mid-Ulster. She is a formidable woman, a woman with a keen intellect. It is because she is such an independent thinker that many people have difficulty with her. Many of her opponents have a fear of her.

Bernadette suffered grievously at the hands of loyalists for taking a stand in support of the republican prisoners in Long Kesh during the hunger-strikes in 1980 and 1981. She and her husband, Michael Mc Aliskey, were shot many times and seriously wounded while her three children looked on in their home outside Coalisland, in county Tyrone.

Bernadette is now working with immigrants in a group called STEP (South Tyrone Empowerment Programme), trying to make sure that the immigrants get their rights and are treated as equals. Bernadette and her team work to ensure that migrants are treated with dignity and respect.

Film-maker, Lelia Doolin, made an interesting documentary about Bernadette’s life in 2012 which was screened on TG4. Bernadette is always interesting to listen to and is sure to make you think, even if you do not always agree with everything she says.

May she continue to do what all good revolutionaries are expected to do – afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and cause as much trouble as possible for the political establisment.