The Price of my Soul by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

She was elected, becoming the youngest woman ever to serve in Parliament and the youngest member of parliament in over 200 years. However, she emerged as the Unity candidate for the nationalist community in a by-election for the Mid-Ulster seat to the Westminster Parliament. People's Democracy entered the Northern Irish parliamentary election of March 1969, and Devlin unsuccessfully contested the South Derry constituency. She was with that group in the celebrated march in January 1969 from Belfast to Derry which was assaulted by police auxiliaries and other Unionist militants at Burntollet Bridge along the route. Devlin took part in several of these marches, which met a combination of police obstruction and militant Protestant threats.ĭevlin was one of the founders of People's Democracy, a student movement concerned with the civil rights cause and of decidedly socialist temperament. They sought to emulate the tactics of African Americans by conducting a series of protest marches throughout Northern Ireland. Their specific grievances included the restricted franchise in local government elections (which de facto disenfranchised a higher percentage of Catholics), gerry-mandered local government districts, and the consequent discriminatory treatment in public hiring and availability of benefits, especially public housing. In place of the immediately unlikely goal of Irish unity, they began to insist on civil rights for the minority (that is, the Catholic) community within Northern Ireland as appropriate for citizens of the United Kingdom.

This was a period when many in the younger Catholic community in Northern Ireland were turning away from both constitutional nationalism as represented by the socially respectable and bourgeois Nationalist party and the revolutionary Sinn Fein movement. Patrick's Academy, Dungannon, County Tyrone, and entered Queen's University, Belfast, in 1965 to study psychology. From both parents (her father who died when she was nine and her mother who died when she was 19) she developed a strong Irish Republican spirit and a sense of detestation for pharisaical piety and respectability. Her mother's family, who were of strong farmer and publican background, opposed her parent's marriage because her father was from a laboring background. She intermixed socialism, Irish republicanism, anti-clericalism, and feminism with general political impracticality and radical brashness.īernadette Devlin was the third of the six children of John James and Elizabeth Bernadette Devlin of Cookstown, County Tyrone. The youngest woman ever elected to the British Parliament, Bernadette Devlin (born 1947) personified the young radical Catholics of Northern Ireland at the onset of the modern troubles.

The Price of my Soul by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey