University of Virginia Library

'Revolutionary Socialist' Bernadette Devlin Speaks

By Jeffrey Ruggles
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

"Most of you have probably thought
that by coming here tonight you would
hear either the rantings of the
revolutionary Catholic firebrand
Bernadette Devlin, or the reincarnation of
Saint Joan of Arc. Much as I hate to
disillusion your great confidence in the
American press, I don't fit into either
category."

Bernadette Devlin

Thus began Bernadette Devlin,
Member of the British Parliament from
Northern Ireland, speaking to a crowd of 1,000
at Randolph Macon Woman's College in
Lynchburg Saturday night.

"Northern Ireland isn't very much like the
place you read about in your newspapers either.
We have violence in Northern Ireland; that
seems to surprise you. There are people that
might surprise; but it shouldn't surprise
Americans.

"We have a hundred people maybe fighting
in the streets. For every hundred fighting in the
streets you could produce a thousand. We have
religious prejudice in Northern Ireland. Surely
you realize the racial prejudice which exists in
your country.

"This is quite a comfortable hall. I was once
a student. Many of you probably think that
everybody in the world has an average
intelligence somewhere approaching your own
level; everybody in the world has an average
income something approaching your father's.
Well, there's lots of people that don't have it.

"There's lots of people in Northern Ireland,
right here in this time, and many people in
America, and in the rest of the world, to whom
the words poverty, repression, hunger, cold,
deprivation, are not merely evils to be wiped
out of society, but real things which they suffer
from.

"In Northern Ireland, as in America, we
have statistics. Statistics are very cold things;
they make people feel learned. Our statistics in
Northern Ireland, the ones you have probably
heard, run something like two thirds of our
population is Protestant, one third of our
population is Catholic.

"We have much more important statistics,
though. Our average unemployment is ten
percent. Ten percent is average. Move away
from the seacoast, and the capital city of
Belfast, which is nearest the British market,
moving to the center of our land, real
unemployment reaches 28 percent. 1 represent
a town like that in Parliament. People ask me to
represent it in a reasonable manner. How can
those 28 percent be reasonable on the question
of unemployment? They are the unemployed.

"In the city of Derry, which you've heard
of, that's where people riot, that's where people
don't obey the law. They've got no respect for
the police, for the members of Parliament, no
respect for the government, no respect for the
system; because none of those institutions have
ever had any respect for them. In the ghettos of
Derry, real unemployment is 40 to 50 percent.

"But those figures are quite cold. You
wouldn't have a clue, really, most of you here,
what unemployment means. You don't know
the feeling, you have just read about it in the
papers. I'll bet very few of you have ever
suffered. What unemployment does, to a person
in Northern Ireland, or an American, it makes
him less than a human being."

Miss Devlin went on to discuss how
unemployment causes low wages, and low
wages cause unemployment; she said that when
you're caught in a system like that "you don't
get to be a very reasonable person." She said
there are only two classes: the workers and the
exploiters. Any divisions among the workers are
placed there to keep them from turning on the
exploiters. "We're not interested in Protestant
or Catholic flush toilets - just flush toilets."

Miss Devlin spoke of the growth of the
corporate state in America after the Civil War,
and said the current Mr. Rockefeller should be
prosecuted as "a receiver of stolen goods." She
criticized many of the woman's liberation
groups: "You are the ones who plot for the
liberation of women. You sit on your
intellectual backsides, and plan. What have you
done to unionize the working woman?"

Prior to the speech, there was a brief news
conference. Among other things, she said
"Since when were systems more important than
people?"; on Angela Davis, "She is innocent,
she hasn't been proven guilty." "I consider Miss
Davis one of the best people in this country";
and that the Black Panthers are very
misunderstood, as the press exploits the
extremists, much the same as happens to her
group.

She said she had been very politely received
in America, more than she expected and much
better than England.

Photos by Charley Sands