The PSA Lecture: Bernadette McAliskey

In this PSA – British Library Lecture, Bernadette McAliskey explores the way the events and various protest movements of 1968 energised each other, creating both the expectations and opportunities for significant social change, for advances in equality and a more inclusive democratic system. In conversation with Robert Gildea, she assesses the legacy and impact of this profound period 50 years on, what was gained and what was lost and where do we go from here.

Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin) has been a social change activist, organiser and campaigner all her adult life. She is actively involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement and is a founding  member of  the student movement, People’s Democracy, in 1968. She was elected to Westminster in 1969, aged 21 on a radical  manifesto which included integrated education and cancelling the national debt.  She sat as an independent MP in both Labour and Conservative led Parliaments (1969-1974).  During this time, she  served a six-month prison sentence for her leadership role in the Battle of Bogside (1969) and later survived an assassination attempt in 1981. She was and remains critical of the Northern Ireland Peace Process through which the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement was reached in 1998, arguing that the deliberate ambiguity it enshrined was unsustainable; that it institutionalised segregation and sought to manage rather than resolve sectarian perspectives.  She has remained an active human rights campaigner, spending much of her time in grassroots organising. In 1996 she co-founded S.T.E.P. (South Tyrone Empowerment Programme), a rights-based community owned resource, learning and development organisation working with ‘the people furthest from the table of power and plenty’  including new immigrants, migrant worker families and refugees. She describes herself as a socialist republican and feminist.

Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford and leader of an international research project – ‘Around 1968: Activists, Networks and Trajectories’ – which recorded the spoken testimonies of more than 500 protesters from all over Europe. He edited the subsequent publication, Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (OUP, 2013).

The PSA - British Library Lecture Series 2018 aims to inspire public engagement and a better understanding of politics, especially within wider historical and cultural contexts.

Part of the Political Studies Association lecture series

Image: Bernadette McAliskey