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From Socialist Worker, No. 120, 1 May 1969, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
IT’S BEGINNING to dawn on Fleet Street that 22 years-old Bernadette Devlin is no student nine-day wonder to be feted and rendered harmless.
Even after a gruelling election campaign followed by a weekend in the Bogside area of Derry, where she advised the people to form a Citizens’ Army to protect themselves from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, she has given as good as she got in interview after interview.
Terence O’Neill’s reputation, so far largely unsullied in the Tory press has got a hammering from which he will not recover in a hurry.
Despite the attempts by press and interviewers to get Bernadette to praise O’Neill, she has refused to budge from her statement that mainstream Unionism, headed at the moment by O’Neill, is the main enemy of the civil rights movement.
To shocked reporters she declared:
‘The only difference between O’Neill and the Paisleyites is that the unfortunate Paisleyites don’t have hyphenated names. The Unionist rebels want to walk over us with hob-nailed boots, O’Neill would use carpet slippers.’
Bernadette joined the civil rights campaign last August when she took part in a march from Coalisland to Dungannon, where she was kicked by stewards because she shouted slogans other than the official ones.
In Derry on October 5 she supported Eamonn McCann’s call that the march should defy the ban placed on it by Police Minister William Craig.
The resulting RUC brutality confirmed to Bernadette that she must take a full part in the campaign.
In the following week she took part in the founding of People’s Democracy, the mainly student body which was to play a major part in the movement from then on.
When the middle of the road leaders of both the Derry Citizen’s Action Committee and the Civil Rights Association tried to use the sacking of Craig as a signal to call off the campaign, Bernadette was one of those who struggled to break the truce.
On the famous “long march” from Belfast to Derry in January the action which effectively smashed the truce, Bernadette underwent another transformation. The young ‘do-gooding’ student saw the need to fight against the right-wing in the movement as part of the fight against Toryism in Ireland, North and South.
In the General Election which followed the second split in the Tory Party she was picked to fight Major James Chichester-Clark for the South Derry seat. She won the highest vote of the eight PD candidates.
The poll and the non-sectarian manner in which she put across the PD message set the pace for Mid-Ulster. The seat was set to become the cockpit for a great faction fight as Green Tory carpetbaggers like Austin Currie turned first left then right in an attempt to project himself as the all-purpose unity candidate.
The grass-roots anti-Unionists demanded and got a say in the selection of the candidate to fight the Orange Tory. A unity convention was agreed to.
Even before the convention it was clear that Bernadette was the choice of the ‘white negroes’ and the only non-Unionist candidate who stood a hope of getting any Protestant votes.
The Tories tried to destroy her with a communist scare. The fact that Northern Ireland’s tiny CP was backing one of the nationalist Tories was neither here nor there.
The diversions failed. Bernadette stormed to victory with Protestant as well as Catholic votes and hammered another nail in the coffin of the Tory police state.
Last updated: 15 January 2021