Why I became a revolutionist
The following is from the introductory chapters of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey's political autobiography, edited by Gerry Foley. (Copyright from a book to be published next year by Brandon Book Publishers, Dingle Ireland.) final version that will appear in the book will be further edited. have been added by IV.
A long and complex historical development set the stage for the renewal of the fight for Irish national liberation that began in 1968-69. That in fact was what the Northern Ireland civil rights movement represented, although I was not. aware of it at the time. Indeed, the leaders of the movement-conservatives, moderates, and the most radical socialistswere convinced and determined that it had to be something else. Their ideas of what it should be, of course, differed, but they were all agreed that it had to be a new "modern" sort of a movement that could avoid the quicksands in which all the attempts to resume the march of nahad become bogged down for the last fifty years.
Although I had grown up steeped in Irish history, I was far from understanding the historical forces that were being set in motion. I was shaped by that history and placed by it in a position to play a central role in the struggle that was beginning. The part I came to play determined by an interaction between my understanding, rational forces that I did not understand, and blind chance. But as the struggle advanced, I had to try to gain a conscious understanding of the forces that were at work. had to in order to survive and move for-
And the same is true of all of my generation who became involved in the fight that started in 1968-69 and who re-
This book is a history of that process more than it is a history of the civil rights movement or of the last ten years of struggle.
In the decade preceding the start of the civil rights movement, the largest IRA military campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland since the war of Irish independence had flickered to a demoralizing end. It was officially concluded in 1961, after it had in fact faded out. The war had failed to rouse the oppressed community even though the majority of the oppressed people showed their support for the IRA in the 1955 elections in itself decided that there was something wrong with the traditional approach. began to explore ways of using its organization to build mass social struggles
In the late 1960s in Ireland, there did seem to be real possibilities for winning social reforms without directly confronting the national issue. were a period of rapid economic development in the twenty-six the formally independent part There was a rise of trade. union struggles and of demands for bringing the backward social welfare system into line with the standards existing in the long moribund Irish Labour Party began to take on some life as a Social Democratic alternative. The major Irish unions affiliated to it, and it began to attract youth and other elements interested in reform and progress.
In the six counties that make up Northern Ireland, a British province, the 1960s were a period of "liberalization." We were led to believe that we were finally going to enjoy the benefits of being "British subjects. " The people of Northern Ireland are supposed to enjoy both the "advantages" of British citizenship and "home rule." A local parliament was established in Stormont Castle outside Belfast in war of independence, allegedly a part of a British plan for extending "home rule" to the entire island. There was also to be a local parliament in Dublin to administer the areas where there was a large Catholic, nationalist majority. These two local governments were to be linked in a Coun cil of Ireland, which has never met.
In fact, what happened was that the British overlords handed over to their auxiliaries, the pro-imperialist Protestant ruling class, as much of the country as they could effectively control.
"Home rule" in Northern Ireland meant the rule of a completely reactionary combination of sweat-shop bosses and landlords, whose social and economic position depended on the oppression of the Catholic population, the descendents of the Irish people who were robbed of their lands and rights by the English conquest and settlement. This "home rule" was based on forces that were the equivalent of racist gangs in other coloniesthe Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and constabulary, known as the "B-Specials." Oppression of the was an integral part the standpoint of the and those who identified their interests with them, the oppressie. of the Catholics was necessary to keep the latter from becoming the majority. They had to be forced to emigrate in larger numbers than Protestants. the standpoint of both the Protestant rulers and their British overlords, the Protestants had to be given privileges at the expense of the Catholics in order to assure their continued support for Bri-
The meager advantages granted the Protestant masses paid off twofold for
The Protestants were given a feeling that they had a stake in the status quo and therefore had something to lose from social change. They were also kept in constant fear of the Catholic popula tion that they knew must resent the pri vileges they had and be plotting to take
FROM ILLUSIONS OF REFORM
TO REVOLUTIONARY MILITANCY So, all that "home rule" for Northern Ireland was in reality was a license for repression, an excuse for maintaining a more repressive and reactionary setup than existed in any other "part" of the United Kingdom.
But in the 1960s, this system seemed to be changing. prime minister, Terence O'Neill, began making friendly faces at the Catholic middle-class. He actually let himself be photographed with nuns, and informec Protestants that if the living standards of Catholics were improved they "would live like Protestants...They will refuse to have eighteen children." The world seemed to be changing so rapidly that the Catholics in Northern Ireland could hope that the anomaly of a stagnant, bigoted, repressive enclave in the United Kingdom could not much longer be maintained. Northern Ireland society would have to become more like the rest of the modern European world, more like Britain.
My generation of Catholics was the second to gain some real access to higher education. The first were the new Catholie middle class leaders such as John Hume, who were also the first leaders of
23
the civil rights movement. They had expected to be accepted into "respectable"
circles, but found themselves still excluded by the traditional pattern of discrimination. That was what turned them back toward their own community and toward organizing protests. We were the second wave, a broader social layer, more ready to fight. We also had higher aspirations than the older generations of Catholies, more of an awareness of what was going on in the world outside, and also more illusions. It was possible for us, even the most radical of us, to believe that we could win major changes in the system through peaceful mass protests alone.
We were part of the general reformist ferment that was opening up the Catholic community to new ideas, new forms of action and organization, and new hope. This ferment was also breaking down the traditional political structures in the Catholic community and thereby opening up the way for us to take a leading role. stances of the time and the influence at made us especially iconoclastic We tended to look down on the nationalist tradition, which in the long impasse since the War of Independence had become more and more reduced to sterile sentiment, if not emp ty bombast and hypocrisy. We were not interested in the traditional nationalist organizations, which seemed to us to be just survivals of the past. The republican forms of organization-the antiquated rituals of nineteenth century military conspiracy-particularly put us off. We were not much interested in organization. We were attracted by new ideas and action, by the chance to take initiatives, to exin the space of a few months, we opened up the flood gates of the long dammed up Irish revolution. swept us along as it did all the political forces in the oppressed community. We were forced to learn to navigate in it by being tossed on reef after reef. Those who refused to go with the current, the 1960s leadership of the IRA (which came to call itself the "Official" IRA) were politically destroyed by it, eventually becoming a disgrace to their own former principles. their predetermined course, they had to turn on their own revolutionary members, murdering some and driving most
Ireland became an unparalleled laboratory for studying the dynamics of mass movements. We saw the price that had to be paid for political mistakes. We learned. A new Irish revolutionary generation came of age. And the components of a new mass revolutionary movement began to come together for the first time since the 1913-1922 period, a movement that can achieve the freedom of Ireland.
The new upsurge of the national liberation struggle since 1969 has in fact borne the imprint of the changes in Ireland that we saw, of the consciousness of my generation, and of the forms of mass 24 actic tion, the activists in beer
SO tion on imperialism. acti extremely powerful. start cons pidl they
REVOLUTIONIST I was a very hard working student through grammar school. I did not think about politics in a conscious way. My idea was to get through, get to university, and get into a position where I could support the rest of the family. My first three years in the university I concentrated exclusively on getting a first-class honours degree in psychology.
Most of the students I knew ran out of their grant by midyear and sent home for money. I not only lived on my grant, I actually sent money home from it. That meant that I basically lived to work. In those first three years, I did not attend one single political meeting
In January 1967, my mother died, leaving me responsible for the rest of the family. So, in the summers of 1967 and 1968, in return for their material assistance, I worked for my mother's browasn't prepared to ask them for money who kept a public house. without working for it. Actually, this experience furthered my political education, taking me out of the close, proteclearned more about the society in which
Working in the bar, I could see the restrictions that there were on people. It became obvious that it was possible for Catholics and Protestants to maintain friendships only by blocking off parts of their lives. That was most noticeable around the Twelfth of July, the time of the big Orange marches. The Catholic patrons quietly their Protestant friends, however unintentional or unconscious. they belieyed that after the Twelfth, it would all go away again.
I remembered that as a child living on a mixed housing estate, our Protestant friends were not allowed to play with us during the month of July. All friendships were temporarily suspended. This was
The month would pass, and they would all come sneaking back, and be welcomed again as freinds.
The first civil rights march was in August 1968. It started in Coalisland, near Cookstown, and went to Dungannon, about five miles away. I was never very clear about why I went. I was at home, away from the university, and so I did not go as a student. either because I was involved in political activity in the university. I was not. But I was aware of the issue that sparked the demonstration.
The issue was discrimination against Catholics in the allocation of council houses, specifically what was known as the Caledon incident. A house had been given to an unmarried Protestant woman and denied to a Catholic family that had been waiting for years. The march was organized by the Social Justice Campaign. Austin Curry was involved. He was a young Catholic politician, a school teacher. He was regarded at the time as an outsider and a radical by most of the clergy and the established Catholic politicians. He later became one of the main figures in remodeling the bourgeois Ca. tholic party so that it could survive in changing times.
There were probably some people who went to that march and never went on another, but these must have been very few. I was determined at the end of that first march that I was going to be on the second and the third and all the rest of them, even though I was still not very clear about what I wanted.
The speakers were Gerry Fitt, a member of the British parliament for the main Belfast Catholic ghetto, Betty Sinclair of the Communist Party, and Ers kine Holmes of the Liberal Party. I remember nothing that any of them said, except that Gerry Fitt promised that he would lead us through the police, who refused to allow us to enter the town; and that of course he did not.
What I remember is the solidarity of the people who were there and the feeling of pride and determination that they communicated. remember the confrontation with the police and the sort of reaction it produced in me. The realization hit that you could not even walk on your own street and state your mind, that the police would stop you. That made me feel determined that whatever else I might be prepared to put up with, I was not going to let the police keep me from saying my piece. I thought that all my life I had let people walk over me and then once I went onto the street to say my bit, the whole apparatus of the state came down on me to try to shut me up. I could not put it in words. But I realized then once and for all what my place was in this society and that I was not going to accept it.
The bulk of those who marched that day were from the immediate area. Most of them were probably unemployed
There were also a lot of people in their forties, fifties, and sixties In later years when I came back to live in this area, I found out that they were the people who were maintaining the resistance here. They were the fighters of the
They were the layer who became involved in the struggle at the age of seventeen and eighteen in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of them had become active on the question of unemployment. But most of them became involved as repu-
There were a large number of womr. on that march, although they were not organized as women. Most of them were members of political groups, or were there with their husbands. There were a
Many people brought children on their shoulders. very lighthearted. It was not such a big crowd, I think, looking back on it, maybe two or three thousand. But people had never gathered before in this area in such large numbers. This created energy, enthusiasm, and a spirit in the people. This gave them confidence that now they were really off their knees. only once they were off their kness, that they realized that they had been on them for so many years.
I remember that I was surprised to see people from the university in Belfast such as Michael Farrell and Patricia Drinan, people that I'd seen around the university and known to be political people. I remember being surprised that they had come to Coalisland and that they all had
The next march was held in Derry City on October 5. I had a male friend, English by birth and Irish by parentage. He was a strong republican and wanted to go. I was determined to go myself. So, the two of us went there on our own. Many of the same people were therethe young Derry activists, people like
White and Eamon McCann, whom I didn't know at the time.
I remember that there had been a running argument in the papers about whether the Derry march was going ahead or was going to be banned. banned. But that made me even more determined to go.
Even after all the things that have happened in the last ten years, the memory of that march still stands out in my
I can still see it clearly when I close my eyes the police wading into the I was terrified, and I think everyone was terrified. But terrified as you were, something made you know that you were going to come back for more. And from that day on, people kept doing that. They kept being beaten off the streets and coming back on again, then being beaten off again and coming back. It seems like a kind of madness when you hindsight why you kept coming back for more. Well, you just did. You knew that
You knew that if you let them beat you down, you would never be able to lift yourself again. You would have to accept that having discovered your place in society that it was good enough for you. So, everytime they tried to drive us off the streets, we became more angry and determined, and that anger and determination started to put Northern Ireland into the headlines of the
The new term at university started the week after the Derry march. A meeting was called by the Young Socialist
Alliance, the Liberals, and the Republican was to organize a march to city hall to protest against the brutality of the police in Derry. students became strongly involved in it. Of course, the march was halted by the police before it got to city hall. A rally was held in front of the police lines. I remember Michael Farrell speaking. did not know Farrell personally, but I knew that he was involved with the Young Socialist Alliance. obviously the best speaker there. could articulate what we felt. I do not remember what he said particularly but I remember that it was Someone said that we would stay there until hell froze over. I think that it was Farrell, although he later denied it. I know that I was quite prepared to stay sitting there as long as necessary. But after a while we marched back to the
The crowd moved in a spontaneous way. We filed in orderly ranks back into the student union building, which had a big assembly hall in the basement. The leaders went down there, so the rest of
There were several thousand students. The hall was packed A very impromptu meeting started. ple got up to speak. A chair was elected We discussed the whole question of the march, why we had been stopped, and police brutality. The only ones with any clear idea of why it was all happening was the group of people around Michael Far-
Yet, I remember thinking at the time that these people were the Young Socialist Alliance. My Catholic training me that these were going to jump on this bandwagon and lead us all down the dreaded road to Communism, rape all the nuns, and burn all the chapels. I sat there listening to Farrell and thinking that what he was saying and that it was what I felt but also being very suspicious because it was Farrell who was saying it.
Bernadette Devlin MeAliskey (DR)
It was at that meeting that People's Democracy was constituted. It began as a very loose organization. It was decided that there would be another march. This was the first political meeting that I ever attended. I was sitting there like all the other people feeling excited about the
The question of filing for the march came up. And one after the other, the students who had organized the initial got up and explained why they couldn't file for the next one themselves. Their fathers wouldn't allow it. The dean of their faculty would make trouble for
I got so angry that I stood up in the middle of the crowd and said: file for the march." I'm not sure why I did it. I think that it was an instinctive reaction. All these people who were making excuses were middle class kids to me. I had a gut reaction against them. were all too nice to go any further now that the going was getting tough. And so
"I'll file for the march. have anything to lose. that was greeted with cheers and sighs of relief, that some idiot had been found who would do it. (The person "filing" for the march was legally responsible for anything resulting from it.)
COMBINATION OF NATIONALIST
AND WORKING CLASS TRADITIONS My personal background put me at the crossroads of the tendencies that were developing. I had absorbed the Irish revolutionary tradition as a child, but I grew up outside the world of the republican
Along with this, I gained a strong consciousness of being part of the working class and of the social and economie problems faced by working people in
I was the middle child of a family of six. My father died when I was about nine years old about him is that when he was home he
shaken by the wind, no mere vox cla- impression on me growing up was not the did not work. That was because there were no jobs in our area. The only work prophet.
to be hand was in England
My father, I suppose, was not typical of the men of his generation in that when he was not working, he helped a lot demption:
in the home. He took me to school as a child.
It was my father who put us to bed and told us bedtime stories.
the
As a child, though, I wasn't aware that the stories I was told were not the same that English children of my age would hear.
I was not brought up on the tales of the divine epos. Hans Christian Anderson or Little Red Riding Hood but on tales of the mythical Gaelie heroes Finn Mac Cumhail and Cuchullain, of the People of the Goddess Dana, the gifted ancient folk, who, it was told, retired under the hills when ironusing warriors first occupied our country. I was brought up on tales of the Irish struggle, of the Peep O'Day Boys, Conpower of life.
gone into the
We should have rewards that had
What I remember nolly, and Larkin. sort; for he
These stories were very simply told. It was not until I went to grammer school that I realized that I had been given a grounding in Irish history. It was not until I was an adult that I realized that I had been given a republican version of Irish history and a labour-oriented one as well. For an Irish child like me, getting a basic political education was as natural as growing up in an Irish family. It was part of with
Of course, they
But in my case, like later
Gaelic League.
this also that as a teenager I became in-
Gaelie Leaguers.
terested in Gaelic, the old language of our people, and came to spend my summers in west Donegal, where the continuity of the language and tradition has been maintained to this day. (This was contingent, of course, in the "education" system. Young nationalist/Catholic people
"grammer" education for not selected had no such opportunity.)
The role of the language, by the way, indicates something about the way disinherited as we
For this we went
I
The Irish lantradition works in Ireland.
guage and the lore and attitudes associated with it make up the oldest stratum of boys forever."
new ones tradition in our country. But the language only really became a generally accepted part of nationalism in this century. It was made so by the generation that prepared the way for the 1916 rising and the war of independence.
More than any other leader of that and shopfarmers keepers generation, Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 rising, was responsible for the fusion of the language question and namost Irish people.
tionalism. He explained what he thought about the role of the language in a speech he gave in 1913, called "The Coming Revolution":
"I have come to the conclusion that the Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, is a spent force; and I am glad of it. I do not mean that no work remains for the
Gaelic League, or that the Gaelic League is no longer equal to work; I mean that the vital work to be done in the new Ireland will be done not so much by the
Gaelie League itself as by men and movements that have sprung from the Gaelic
League or have received from the Gaelic
League a new baptism and a new life of ment.
was no reed
The Gaelic League grace.
26 that
Our tradition is a
My