Irish Phenomenon
Hughes, Catharine
Irish Phenomenon The Price of My Soul, by Ber-nadette Devlin. Alfred A. Knopf. 224 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Catharine Hughes Northern Ireland is two countries. It is rich and it is poor, it is...
...Miss Devlin's visit here, the countless words that have been written about her, and photographs without number have made her almost as familiar to Americans as to the Irish (North and South, I hasten to add...
...As Miss Devlin says, she is a "phenomenon," the product of a particular moment in a particular people's history...
...And, in assessing them, it is difficult to question her assertion: "It will take a long time to achieve anything...
...My father had worked and paid insurance all his life, but they made us feel they were paying out money to the unworthy poor who had the bloody cheek to be orphans," she writes...
...Miss Devlin tells of her childhood and the circumstances and events that eventually made her a socialist...
...we are not prepared to grow old into it...
...It is rich and it is poor, it is Protestant and it is Catholic, and, as Bernadette Devlin writes in this lively, provocative, and entertaining memoir of her twenty-two years, "The tragedy of the situation is that by aligning themselves with those who work against their interests but share their religion, the working class of my country, Protestant and Catholic, perpetuates its own misery...
...In the Northern Ireland of today, they are characteristics that seem far more virtues than vices...
...But if it becomes necessary we will simply make it impossible for any unjust government to govern us...
...It has all been reported in the press but without the enormous immediacy, poignancy, and ironic humor Miss Devlin's account lends...
...I'm not a socialist because of any high-flown intellectual theorizing: life has made me one...
...I have written this book in an attempt to explain how the complex of economic, social, and political problems of Northern Ireland threw up the phenomenon of Bernadette Devlin," she says in the Foreword...
...She tells of the civil rights march in August, 1968, with its peaceful and as yet uncoalesced discontent, and of the October march to Deny which ignited it all—the moment from which Northern Ireland could never be the same...
...of life in a family where her father was forced to work in England in order to support them (unfortunately, far from an exceptional situation in Ulster), of living on welfare benefits after his death...
...Of her fellow MPs she is equally scornful: "Nothing really matters...
...The representatives, once inside the structure, no longer represent...
...For half a century [the Unionist Party] has misgoverned us, but it is on the way out...
...We will try to achieve it by peaceful means...
...The reasons they are not could hardly be related with more urgency or more drama...
...The people have made their situation clear...
...But it is in relating the events of the past eighteen months that Miss Devlin's book has its greatest interest...
...And with traditional Irish mercy, when we've got it down we will kick it into the ground...
...Parliament is just a friendly club...
...And in the end, I believe, it will come to a clash...
...What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which the book conforms to the image, the degree to which Miss Devlin emerges as so many of the things she most objects to people saying she is: brash, more than a little arrogant, refreshing, and certainly ironic...
...We will fight for justice...
...The press had built me up so much on the baby of Parliament, swinging MP, guess-whose-birthday-it-is-today angle," she wryly observes of her maiden speech in Parliament a few months later, "that they couldn't in consideration of their own sales, turn round and condemn the speech...
...We were born into an unjust system...
...As a result, there is little that is really surprising in The Price of My Soul...
...it if one that makes it possible to grasp more fully the depth of the emotions, the conflicting currents, and the virtual inevitability of the violence that has occurred...
...Because of her youth, her idealism (not unmixed with a strong sense of reality), and her ability to articulate the discontent of her people, she has become a symbol, a rallying-point...
...In the end, of course, it is the factors that created her—the inequities, the centuries of prejudice, the intolerable poverty and unemployment—that are really important...
...But whatever happens, never again will the Unionist government be able to govern Northern Ireland as it has done since the country was created by an Act of Parliament...
...I am only one among hundreds of my generation...
...When I was in Ireland in October, I saw nothing in the streets of Belfast or Deny, and felt nothing in the atmosphere, to lead me to believe it will be any easier than that...
...Now we are witnessing its dying convulsions...
...Obviously, it is not an objective account...
Vol. 34 • January 1970 • No. 1
