That the title of Bernadette Devlin's book* is a wry comment on the system which produces such books, seems to have escaped the cover designer. Her name blares forth in loud red letters over a blurb which tells us: "The fighting Irish girl M.P. tells her personal story and what is really happening inside Ulster ..."
This contradiction between the attempt of the communications industry to turn Bernadette, and the struggle in Northern Ireland, into a commodity, and the counter-attempt to filter through the media some facts about oppression in the province, runs through the whole book.
The inane way in which the press attempts to wear down a person who is in the news, and empty their activity of any real content so that they conform to some saleable "image" is vividly exposed; as to their lack of genuine interest in the struggles in the six counties or in any of the ideas which Bernadette developed through the fight in the civil rights movement. For this exposure the book is valuable, as also for the sidelight shed on life in Ulster by its description of a girlhood in Cookstown, County Tyrone. However, on the level of information and interpretation there is more valuable material available than this hastily-written book.
But, like it or not, Bernadette Devlin is a phenomenon, and her influence has to be assessed. There are [illegible] in the way of such an assessment; the relentless publicity surrounding her [illegible] this book. The fact is that Bernadette Devlin's political development did not begin until just over one year ago, after the RUC riot on October 5th in Derry, the Queen's University demonstration, and the subsequent birth of People's Democracy. Like most of the PD militants, she moved rapidly to the left, from an unthinking, hereditary Republicanism. The result is that her political ideas consist of emotional responses to the oppression she sees around her, mixed with some undigested chunks of Marxism, which she has taken from Mike Farrell and Eamonn McCann, for whom she expresses admiration.
This political inexperience shows clearly in a number of statements in the book. Referring to the difficulties encountered by PD due to the increasing influence of middle-class elements within the Civil Rights movement, who were purely interested in advancing the interests of the Catholics and not from a class viewpoint, she says:
"Where the PD made its mistake was in not seeing soon enough that identification with such policies was too high a price to pay for the unity of the civil rights movement. Just at the point when we were breaking through as a socialist force, we back-pedalled on socialism to keep the movement together, and by losing our identity within what was regarded as a Catholic movement, we made more difficult for ourselves the almost insuperable problem of enlisting the support of the Protestant working class."
This problem must be solved by Irish revolutionaries, but it is not simply a matter of not "back-pedalling" on socialism. Orangism is a tough nut to crack; it will never be cracked without a transitional programme for the Irish workers which tackles the religious divisions. The vacillations between absorption by the Catholic middle class and revolutionary socialism described here is a clear symptom of the lack of such a programme. There is also confusion in her references to communism—"The Cardinal (Conway) knew perfectly well the difference between communists and socialists, and the Marxist theory propagated in Northern Ireland had been strongly anticommunist." There is a hint here, not only of a misunderstanding about Marxism, Stalinism and Communism, but also of some lingering Catholic anti-communism. The balance of evidence in the book, however, suggests a sincere attempt to grapple with the problems of the Irish workers, and to resist the pressures of the parliamentary system.
Whatever the verdict of history on Bernadette Devlin as an individual, history does give us some guide as to what she represents: essentially the type of populist politics which Ireland and America have shared. Lacking clear theory, based on an emotional appeal against oppression, and carried forward by spontaneous moods, they have usually been smashed, or degenerated into Anarchism or Liberalism.
James Connolly achieved that kind of populist appeal, but combined it with an incomparable theoretical grasp of the dialectics of the Irish revolution. That combination is needed today, but it cannot be achieved by an individual, only by a movement based on Marxist Leninism. In building this movement and equipping it with an adequate theory British Marxists can play a role. It is to be hoped that Bernadette Devlin can also contribute.
Bob Purdie
*The Price of My Soul, Bernadette Devlin, Pan Books, London, 6/-.