She was witness to the 1972 Bloody Sunday Massacre of civilians by British armed forces, and helped form the revolutionary Irish Republican Socialist Party soon after. Presented with a golden key to the city by the New York Mayor in 1970, she famously handed it over the Black Panthers. Her active participation in the Free Derry uprising led to a conviction for ‘inciting riot’, during which time she wrote The Price of My Soul. On the back of her work as a civil rights campaigner, she was elected MP for Mid-Ulster at age 21, serving in Westminister from 1969 to 1974. “Our simplistic historic understanding of fascism needs to be challenged,” warns McAliskey, “fascism is not German, it’s not the Nazism of the Second World War … it starts in the heads of individuals with the idea that what keeps you disadvantaged is that some lesser breed has taken what belongs to you.”īernadette Devlin McAliskey has lived a long and arduous political life. She spoke of the current rise of fascism in the context of the indiscriminate bombing of the town in April 1937 by the German Condor Legion in support of Spanish fascists, a horror of war memorialized in Picasso’s famous Guernica painting. On a recent night in Dublin, Ireland, veteran civil-rights campaigner Bernadette Devlin McAliskey addressed a conference commemorating the 80 th anniversary of the bombing of Gernika – the small Basque town also known by its Spanish name, Guernica – during the Spanish Civil War. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey in the 1960s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |