Playboy Interview: Bernadette Devlin

On April 22, 1969, a young girl stood before the British House of Commons to deliver her first speech as a Member of Parliament. "I understand that by making my maiden speech on the day of my arrival, I am flouting the unwritten tradition of this House," Bernadette Devlin told the surprised M. P.s. "But the situation of my people, I think, merits flouting such a tradition." She then launched into a bitter but lyrical denunciation of British policy in Ireland, rarely referring to notes as she detailed a half century of oppression in her native Ulster. When she sat down after 22 minutes, the stunned silence in the House gave way to thunderous applause. "One after another," reported Newsweek, "M. P.s hailed her maiden speech as one of the best in the history of Commons." As the youngest female Member of Parliament in British history read the glowing accounts in the next morning's papers, she had a double reason for celebration: It was her 22nd birthday.

Bernadette's love affair with the British press was to prove short-lived. Within four months, she was behind Catholic barricades in Derry's embattled Bogside ghetto, hurling rocks at the police; a year later, she was in jail. Today, although she was instrumental in the recent negotiations to bring an end to armed insurrection, Bernadette is a visible symbol of resistance to British rule: She tacitly supports the Irish Republican Army and actively urges a socialist revolution in both England and Ireland. She has further defied convention by bearing a child--Roison Elizabeth, now one year old--out of wedlock and refusing to name the father.

Whether in Parliament, on the barricades, behind bars or on the speakers' platform, Bernadette is the most charismatic leader of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. To learn more about her and the little country that's been the Seventies' bloodiest political battleground west of Vietnam, Playboy sent writer Eric Norden to interview her. Norden reports:

"On my British European Airways flight from London to Belfast, I was sandwiched between an English soldier returning from leave to his Belfast regiment and a pleasantly tweedy lady in her mid-60s, faintly reminiscent of Margaret Rutherford, who was going home from a dog show in Exeter. After some casual conversation, I asked the lady about conditions in Belfast. 'You know, the I.R.A....' I prompted. 'Oh, that,' she sniffed. 'That's the Catholics for you.' Her voice turned hard. 'What we should do is, for every one of us gels killed, execute 20 or 30 of them. And send tanks into their areas, just like you Americans do in Vietnam.' The soldier, who'd been staring glumly out the window, suddenly turned toward me. 'She's right there,' he said in a thick West Country accent. 'Just give us the go-ahead, male, we'll clean up the bastards in two days.' The old lady nodded approvingly. 'It's all the Pope,' she said, 'the Pope and the Communists. They'll kill us all in our beds if they have their way.'

"It was past midnight by the time I got a cab in Belfast. When I gave the taxi driver my destination, the Hotel Europa downtown, he laughed. 'You'll be need-in' new accommodations, my friend. It blew just a few hours ago.' The cabby, a Roman Catholic named Harry, took me to the Conway, a suburban hotel four miles from the heart of the city. I asked him if he'd take me on a tour of Belfast the next day, and he picked me up at the hotel in the morning.

"The gray industrial city was an armed camp, with flak-jacketed soldiers on every corner, automatic weapons at the ready. We drove through the Catholic area of Falls Road, then stopped by the Crumlin Road jail, where hundreds of I. R. A. suspects have been incarcerated. I got out to take some pictures. Suddenly, I heard a shout behind me and turned to see Harry surrounded by three soldiers. They pushed him up against a car and began to search him. I moved forward, but a voice behind me called out, 'Stand still, right where you are.' Something hard was shoved into the small of my back. Hands expertly frisked me. 'All right, turn around.'

"I faced two paratroopers in riot gear. 'Why we you taking pictures of us?' asked one, a corporal. When I started to answer, he relaxed. 'You American?' I nodded. 'The I.R.A. likes to get pictures of us,' he explained. 'Then when we're in civvies having a pint at the pub'--he drew his forefinger meaningfully across his throat. I showed him my letter of identification from Playboy and explained I was doing an interview with Bernadette Devlin. The atmosphere froze. 'Going to put the bleeding sow in the centerfold?' the corporal asked contemptuously. 'People will demand their money back.'

"As we drove off, Harry's face was red. 'Bloody SS men,' he muttered. I tried to explain the soldiers' concern about photographs, but he just grunted. 'The boys don't need their pictures,' he said. 'They know who they are. I hope they kill the whole bloody lot of them.' I was beginning to get the feel of Northern Ireland.

"Back at the Conway, I called Bernadette and arranged to meet her at her home in Cookstown, in County Tyrone. The next morning, Harry and I left Belfast bright and early. Just outside Cookstown, a pleasant farm community surrounded by rolling green hills, we found Bernadette's modest red-brick house. She was waiting for us on the steps. 'Can you give me a lift to Derry?' she asked in a rich brogue. 'I've got to address a meeting there and I'm late.' We piled back into the car and headed for Derry. (Protestants universally, and pointedly, refer to the city as Londonderry, the name given the city after it was ceded to the capital city of London by the British crown in the 17th Century; Catholics tenaciously stick to its original name.) As we drove, Bernadette spoke with resignation about her current legal troubles: Convicted of participating in illegal assembly by defying a ban on public marches, she faced a six-month prison sentence (later suspended when the marchers were granted amnesty). But the prospect didn't seem to daunt her; she had already served four months in prison in 1970, on charges arising from her active participation in the August 1969 riots in Derry.

"As she spoke to me, I found myself reassessing the impression I'd gained through her press photographs. She's only a shade over five feet, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, slightly protuberant gray-green eyes and a wide, mobile mouth with a Terry-Thomas gap between the front teeth. She's indifferent to clothes; for the next week, I saw her in the same outfit, a rumpled red-and-blue minidress and navy-blue coat. Slightly chubby, her features unremarkable and unadorned by make-up, she's nobody's idea of a beauty; but the eyes sparkle so impishly, the smile is so disarming, the brogue so caressing that a certain undeniable charm slips through. Bernadette shouldn't be, but is, a singularly attractive young woman.

"After an hour's drive, we reached the outskirts of Derry, passing a ring of fortified army posts bristling with machine guns. Derry is a medieval fortress city, population 56,000. Bogside, the ghetto where Derry's 40,000 Catholics live, is in a state of permanent insurrection--so far successful. Taxes and rents are not paid, electric and gas bills are ignored and the law of the British crown ends at the barricades--giant piles of burned-out cars, blocks of concrete, steel girders, barbed wire, paving stones and crude but effective concrete tank traps. I.R.A. observation posts, proudly flying the green, white and orange tricolor of the Irish Republic, stud the heights above the barricades. Our destination was a soccer field in the heart of the Bogside--site of the rally Bernadette was scheduled to address. It was a mild sunny day and the mood of the crowd in the bleachers was more festive than bitter.

"Bernadette spoke for a half hour. During the talk, a young redheaded boy dressed in shorts, sandals and a tattered gray pullover caught my attention. His name was Mick and he was 11. 'You're American, aren't you?' he asked. I nodded. 'I sold a rubber bullet to an American reporter once. He paid me 30 pence for it.' 'Where did you find the rubber bullet?' 'Oh, the army shot it at us. You know, after school we all go over to the Brandywell post and throw stones and things. Once I threw a petrol bomb,' he said with pride. I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came. 'That tape recorder you've got is great,' he said, all smiles. 'When my dad gets out, I'm gonna ask him to buy me one of my own.' 'Is your dad in jail?' 'Yeah, the army lifted him.'

"Just then, Bernadette's speech ended. I slung the tape recorder I was carrying over my shoulder and stood up. Mick's eyes looked longingly at the case, and suddenly I had a strong impulse to give it to him. But it was the only one I had brought and my interview with Bernadette was to begin that night. I fumbled a pound note out of my pocket. 'Here, get some sweets with it,' I said awkwardly. Then: 'Look, Mick, do me a favor--don't throw any more stones at the army. Your dad wouldn't want you to.' Mick shook his head firmly. 'Oh, no, my dad would want me to. He says we've gotta kill all of them. We got to.' He smiled indulgently. 'You're American, but if you'd lived 11 years in the Bogside, you wouldn't be afraid, to die either.'

"We drove away. As Harry pulled through the last I. R. A. check point, we heard the rattle of firing up ahead. 'That's the army,' Bernadette said. 'There's trouble.' Suddenly there was a series of quick harsh reports. 'CS,' Bernadette said, as a cloud of while smoke (similar to tear gas) came billowing toward us. 'Put up the windows, quick,' shouted Harry, reversing furiously. We did and skidded around the corner just ahead of the gas.

"When we finally reached the City Hotel in downtown Derry and sat in the bar over double Scotches, more gunfire was stuttering in the distance. I thought of Mick, and the 11 years of life that had prepared him to die, and I wished I had given him the tape recorder, if only to take his mind off the gun he'd have someday. But instead, I switched it on and started asking Bernadette about the bloodshed in Northern Ireland--and the threat it represents to her own life."

[Q] Playboy: Despite frequent death threats and assassination attempts on your associates, you travel without a bodyguard. In the midst of all this violence, don't you worry that your own life is in danger?

[A] Devlin: I think about it from time to time, but it doesn't worry me. That's not mock heroics, just realism. Or may be fatalism. In Derry on Bloody Sunday, when the British paratroops were gunning down people all around me, sure, I thought about it. They murdered 13 unarmed people. As I saw them fall, I said to myself, "Christ! I'm going to die here!" But my parents taught me to enjoy life rather than fear death. And living in a society that's characterized by violence and institutionalized brutality, you somehow come to accept the impermanence of your own life. If anyone's a product of her environment, I am.

[Q] Playboy: Let's discuss that environment. What was it like growing up as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland?

[A] Devlin: Well, it was an education in more ways than one. I was born in Cookstown, in County Tyrone, a small farming community that's sort of a microcosm of Ulster. It was originally a plantation, settled by the Scots Presbyterians the British imported in the 17th Century to take over the land from us restless natives. To this day, the town is divided almost evenly between the descendants of the original Protestant settlers and the Catholics they subjugated; both groups are still segregated in the geographical areas of the town where their ancestors lived 300 years ago. And attitudes haven't changed much, either; the Protestants still have a sense of settler superiority and expect the Catholics to stay in their place and not get uppity, pretty much the way your own American colonists once viewed the Indians, or the way many white Southerners still feel about blacks. And, like the Indians and the blacks, we were poor, virtually disenfranchised and very angry. We still are.

[Q] Playboy: What was your family's economic position?

[A] Devlin: We lived on what you could call the knife edge of poverty. We never actually starved, but often my mother would say to us at the table, "Now, if you eat all the bread, we won't have anything for breakfast tomorrow."

[Q] Playboy: Your parents died when you were fairly young, didn't they?

[A] Devlin: My father died when I was nine, and my mother when I was 19.

[Q] Playboy: How did you, your brothers and sisters manage after her death?

[A] Devlin: Well, our relatives came over to the house and said they'd decided to farm us out among them; but we'd have none of that and told them so. My older sister, Mary, was in a convent, and the other five of us were determined to stay together. I was studying psychology at Queen's University in Belfast, and I had no money outside of a small educational grant. But I resolved that we'd manage somehow. We did, but it taught me how the system operates. We'd been living in a council house, which is government-owned property leased to poor people at low rents. Be fore my mother was cold, a local official came around and said, "There's no adult householder here. You're all under 21, so you've got to clear out." I asked him where we were supposed to go and he said I could go to work, and the children would be placed in orphanages. Well, I just dug in my heels and told him he'd have to call the police to drag us out, because we weren't leaving voluntarily. And finally, after a lot of protracted haggling, they gave in and allowed me to be listed as a householder, even though I was below the legal age limit, because they realized it would be less expensive to keep us at home.

Then I had to go around to the Labor Exchange to arrange for our supplementary welfare benefits to continue. At first, they refused to give us a shilling. It wasn't that they were hostile about it; that would have at least made them human. Instead, they were completely cold, impersonal: "Regulation such and such does not provide for your case under clause so-and-so, as you can clearly see in document blah. Next." What they were really saying was, "Go and starve," but they didn't recognize this. Rules were rules. Most poor people would just shuffle away without argument, but I told the Labor Exchange: "I'm not leaving this building until I get some money." I kept shouting until they gave in. I'm sure they paid us more to get rid of me than anything else. Here I really saw how completely devoid of human feeling the state is; even when it makes an exception, as in our case, it does so not out of goodness but to shut up a potential troublemaker.

I thought to myself, here are my mother and father, both dead at an early age, literally worked into the ground, and to the state their children are nothing but an economic nuisance. At the same time, there were plenty of people in town who had never done a day's work in their lives but had lots of money and were considered outstanding citizens. Suddenly I saw that what plagues Northern Ireland isn't the difference between Catholics and Protestants but the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

[Q] Playboy: Was it these encounters with the state that first awakened your political consciousness?

[A] Devlin: I'd say these events crystallized my political awareness. I'd been a kind of instinctive rebel ever since I was a child. From an early age, I'd heard about the crimes England had committed against Ireland, so I had identified with the nationalist movement; and on a more personal level, I'd seen the way the system treated my mother and father when they were alive, and that, too, was an eye opener.

[Q] Playboy: Were your parents politically active?

[A] Devlin: My father was--or at least he was politically conscious. In a very real way, our whole family's existence was determined by politics. When my father was a teenager, long before he married my mother, he took a flask of hot soup to a friend held in prison by the British for alleged Republican sympathies. The local police force remembered it. When he grew up and applied for his work permit, which you need to get a job in Ulster, the authorities stamped on it: Political Suspect. He'd never been convicted of any crime, never done anything against the state; it all dated back to that one flask of soup. From that point on, he was unemployable in Ulster; Protestants wouldn't hire him and Catholics didn't dare to. That was why he was forced to work in England, which encouraged emigration in order to maintain a pool of low-paid Irish labor. He hated the British for perpetuating such injustices, and so did we.

[Q] Playboy:All the British?

[A] Devlin: Not the British people, of course, but the British government and its repressive system. I suppose what I felt as a child in those days is pretty much what the kids in Belfast and Derry feel today, the nine- and ten-year-olds who hurl petrol bombs--that's what we call Molotov cocktails--at British tanks. They're dimly aware that they and their parents are second-class citizens. They know they hate something, but they can't put their finger on it. So they lash out blindly at the visible symbol of power, the British soldier, when it's real ly the whole system of injustice they should be attacking. But I can understand their reactions, since I felt the same diffuse rage toward the English when I was their age.

[Q] Playboy: Did most Catholic children of your age share this bitterness?

[A] Devlin: Some were more conscious of it than others, but I think all of us felt that the British were our enemy. I remember when I was just four or five years old, my father would sit in my room at night and tell me bedtime stories. Not fairy tales about leprechauns and enchanted princesses but stories of ancient Irish history, when our country was independent; and tales of the British invasions and the Irish uprisings and their bloody suppression. He never pretended to be objective; he was a partisan telling his daughter his own partisan view of history.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't it unhealthy for a child to be indoctrinated with hate in this manner?

[A] Devlin: If it had been hate for all Brit ish people, yes, I think it would have been unhealthy. But my father taught us to hate a system, not a race, and told us that the mass of British working people were just as exploited by that system as we were.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that a subtle distinction for a child to grasp?

[A] Devlin: Well, in my own case, I always understood it, which is why today I'm just as active in Parliament on behalf of striking English coal miners as I am for my own constituents in Northern Ireland. I'm not an Irish nationalist in the narrow-minded sense of exalting everything Irish as superior; I believe in a united socialist Ireland, with the emphasis on socialist. It would do us no good to exchange our British masters for the political parasites who run the present capitalist government in Dublin.

[Q] Playboy: You've been quoted as saying that Castro's Cuba is the model for your proposed Irish socialist state. Since this has prompted the charge that you advocate a Communist dictatorship for Ireland, perhaps you'd better define what you mean by socialism.

[A] Devlin: All right. First, I was misquoted about Cuba. What I said was: Cuba is a case where the people put up a fine fight against overwhelming odds--against the Batista dictatorship, and then against the most powerful country in the world, your own country. I said I admired the Cuban people's courage. But I also said that Cuba is no utopia. There are severe problems of bureaucracy and regimentation there. These must be dealt with.

To get to your larger question, the kind of workers' state I envisage exists nowhere in the world. Russia is a sort of state capitalism; so are its satellites in eastern Europe. China has done many things for its people, but at a high price in terms of individual liberty. All the so-called socialist countries in the world are far better off than they were under their capitalist masters--Batista, Chiang Kai-shek, or the czars--but they're still a long way from genuine socialism. Genuine socialism is a society where the people control their own economy. Not a handful of capitalists--or bureaucrats, as in Russia--but all the people. In this sort of socialist society, you have both economic freedom and personal freedom.

That's the critical question, of course: to reconcile the delicate balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and to en sure that neither is predominant. The so-called Communist states today just don't work, as far as I'm concerned. I certainly don't take them as any kind of model for Irish socialism; but, on the other hand, can you show me one coun try where capitalism really works? So when I speak of an Irish workers' republic, small collective farms and worker-controlled industries, I'm speaking of something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. But it will exist, someday, believe me. It has to.

[Q] Playboy: You were talking about your political education--or indoctrination-- by your father. Did he ever belong to the I. R. A.?

[A] Devlin: I honestly don't know. If he had joined any political party, it certainly would have been the Sinn Fein, which in Gaelic means Ourselves Alone. This is the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. If he did, neither he nor my mother ever told us about it. In the summer of 1956, the I. R. A. launched an abortive military campaign against the British in Northern Ireland. At night, we used to watch the Protestant men in our town leave their houses carrying Sten guns; most of them were members of the B Specials, a volunteer militia formed to suppress the Catholic minority. One of the areas they patrolled was a desolate stretch of swampy land known as the Black Bog, which was a favorite hiding place for I. R. A. men on the run. I remember one evening, shortly after my father died, the sirens started wailing an alert and the B Specials rushed out to search the bog. My brothers and sisters and I sat there staring out our front window across the bog, which was eerily illuminated by searchlights. My mother looked out with us for a long while, and when the searchlights finally went out and the mist rolled in over the bog, she said in a very quiet voice, "At least they'll never get your father now." She didn't spell it out any more explicitly than that, but we could put two and two together.

[Q] Playboy: How did you and your parents feel toward your Protestant neighbors who supported the British? Were you taught to hate them?

[A] Devlin: No, not at all. As far as I'm concerned, Catholic bigots and Protestant bigots are equally bad. One of the tragedies of Northern Ireland is that the children of both groups are educationally segregated; Catholics go to Catholic schools and Protestants to Protestant schools, so Catholic and Protestant children seldom get to know one another as human beings. I remember that when I was in Catholic primary school, one of the girls' most popular rope-skipping songs ran:

Saint Patrick's Day will be jolly and gay

And we'll kick all the Protestants out of the way.

If that won't do, we'll cut them in two

And send them to hell with their red, white and blue.

The Protestant kids had their hate songs, too, where the Pope was the arch-bogeyman. Such attitudes, of course, don't end in school; they only begin there. And eventually, ignorance gives way to fear, and fear to hate; and hate, ultimately, to violence. Much of the responsibility for the sectarian system of education that breeds this intolerance lies with the Roman Catholic Church, which has put its interest in religiously indoctrinating its communicants above the need to reconcile the two communities. In my own case, I was fortunate in getting to know Protestants firsthand.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Devlin: As family friends and good neighbors. Before my mother met and fell in love with my father, she was engaged to a Protestant named Sammy, who subsequently served in the British army. From the point of view of the typical parochial Catholic family, he couldn't have been more unsuitable; my grandmother must really have gone up the wall when she heard about that romance. But even though they eventually married different people, "Uncle Sammy" remained close to our family and visited us frequently. Outside of my own family, I respected Sammy more than any other man I'd ever known; I would have felt proud to be his daughter. So from an early age, I had a Protestant "uncle," which protected me from succumbing to the prejudices that are prevalent among both Catholics and Protestants in Ulster. But I think my case was exceptional. The crime of sectarianism--and it is a crime--runs very deep in our society. It has perverted and poisoned even the best people, the truly good people on both sides. If we are to make Northern Ireland a decent place to live, we must stop thinking of ourselves as Catholic or Protestant, Irish or British, and start thinking of ourselves as human beings, with the same social and economic problems--and the same social and economic enemies.

[Q] Playboy: Are you still a practicing Catholic?

[A] Devlin: My God, we've been practicing Catholicism so long in Ireland we're experts by now. Unfortunately, instead of contemplating the message of Jesus' life and teachings, most Irish Catholics just tell their rosary beads automatically. For all the spiritual insight this exercise gives them, they might as well be playing with a yo-yo. You can go to Mass every day and foreclose your neighbor's mortgage with a clear conscience, but you're perfectly entitled to despise as a godless heathen anyone who doesn't go to Mass. Holy Ireland is the only place in the world where people hate one another in the name of Jesus Christ. And the whole thrust of the Church's teaching in Ireland has been to condition the people to accept temporal authority, whether British or Irish capitalist. Everyone is told that on earth the good suffer and the wicked prosper, but don't worry, just wait until the afterlife! Of course, that's all nonsense. The only reason the good suffer and the wicked prosper is that the good permit it.

[Q] Playboy: You haven't answered our question: Do you consider yourself a Roman Catholic?

[A] Devlin: Well, it's a difficult question and one I can't answer with a straight yes or no. I was raised within a tradition of intense Catholicism, and it's very hard to separate myself from that tradition, even though I may intellectually reject certain aspects of it. If you were to catechize me: "Do you believe the Catholic Church is the one true Church, founded by Christ?" I would have to reply: "No, I'm sorry, I don't believe that." But I do believe that there are certain valuable spiritual and human values held in common by all religions--Catholic, Protestant, Hindu and Moslem alike. It's the geographical accident of your birth that largely determines what religion you accept. I wish those who talk endlessly about their deep Christian convictions would just go out and do something with them: feed the hungry, clothe the poor, house the homeless, help the sick. I can see a socialist's not being a Christian, but I can never understand how a Christian could not be a socialist. Socialism, after all, is what Jesus' message was all about. We honor Jesus, but trample on his principles.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe in God?

[A] Devlin: I just don't know. Wouldn't it be the height of arrogance for me to look out across the universe and declare that there is or there isn't a God? How can I know? All I do know is that whether God is there or not, this earth is ours; it's all we have and it's up to us to either improve or destroy it.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that make you more an agnostic than a Catholic?

[A] Devlin: Yes, except for the fact that I didn't grow up as an agnostic. I was raised not only within an orthodox religion but within a wholly religious culture. In Ireland, we're completely en meshed by the Church; it encompasses all aspects of our lives from birth to death. And the very fact that I've just said "we" and "our" makes my point. You don't shake off that kind of tradition easily, no matter how much you rebel.

[Q] Playboy: When did your own rebellion against the Church begin?

[A] Devlin: I began to question the Church when I was attending a very strict Roman Catholic primary school. During Lent, we used to say special prayers for all the lost Communist souls around the world. One day, I asked the nun why Communist children didn't realize there was a God in heaven. She said this was because they were indoctrinated by their parents and teachers and had to learn only the Communist answers to all questions. Well, I went home and I thought about that. Next day in school, we had to recite from our green-backed catechism book, which began: "Who made the world?" We read out the answer: "God made the world." The next question was: "Who is God?" and we replied in unison: "God is our Heavenly Father." On and on it went, with all us eight-year-olds piping in the required answers. Finally, I put up my hand and asked, "Excuse me, Sister, what is indoctrination?" And she said, a bit impatiently, "I told you yesterday, indoctrination is when you're forced to learn all the answers." And I looked back at the catechism and said, "Sister, isn't that just what we're doing?"

[Q] Playboy: Was this kind of indoctrination the theme of your Catholic education?

[A] Devlin: That was a big part of it, but we also had good and dedicated teachers who tried to expand our intellectual horizons, at least within the limits of their own religious convictions and prejudices.

[Q] Playboy: What subjects interested you most at school?

[A] Devlin: Oh, history and literature, without any doubt. And in Ireland, both those subjects are inextricably involved with politics. The headmistress of my primary school was a marvelous nun, Mother Benignus, who helped me develop self-confidence and who had a big influence on my evolving political convictions. She was a fierce Republican, and she hated the English with an abiding passion; to her, everything English was rotten. If the English Parliament had passed a resolution concurring that the sun comes up in the east every morning, she would have disagreed.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't such hatred at least as harmful to children as the religious in doctrination you've just criticized?

[A] Devlin: Well, yes and no. Some children would extrapolate the lessons of Irish history into a mindless hatred of everything English. But it was vital that we learn about the past roots of our present oppression. By studying our history, I was able to continue the political education I'd begun with my father's bedtime stories. As a consequence, I gained a deeper understanding of what must be done today. To understand the present struggle in Ireland, you must see it from the perspective of 800 years of invasion, oppression, exploitation and genocide. Irish history is written in Irish blood.

[Q] Playboy: Since that history seems to have a direct bearing on what's happening today, let's talk about it. When did the English first become involved in Ireland?

[A] Devlin: It all began, ironically enough in light of what's happened since, when Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, granted Ireland as an "inheritance" to the Norman king of England, Henry II, in 1154. Until then, there was no united Ireland as such, only a loose confederation of independent kingdoms, which united against Henry's invading armies and eventually drove them off. Over the next several hundred years, the English mounted sporadic, unsuccessful campaigns to conquer the island. Then, with the rise of the Tudors, a bloodier page was opened. Before this, the conflict between Ireland and England had had no religious overtones; both were Catholic powers fighting the kind of territorial war that was common in those days. But Henry VIII's break with Rome introduced the bitter note of religious antagonism, because the earls of Ireland remained loyal to the Pope. Their resistance was finally broken in 1601, under Elizabeth I. Protestantism became the official religion of all Ireland, and harsh penalties were imposed on any Irishman who refused to convert.

The vast landholdings of the Irish earls, comprising the richest farmland in Ireland, were seized and granted to English and Scots farmers, Protestants, of course. The original Irish inhabitants were driven into the woods and mountains by British troops. The seaport of Derry was renamed Londonderry, to be settled by London emigrants. For a while, Parliament debated whether the Irish would be transported to the New World as slaves or allowed to stay and work as serfs for the English. Although large numbers were transported, it was decided to keep the majority in Ireland as an agricultural labor force.

In 1638, the embittered Irish revolted against the British and the Protestant landlords, and fighting spread across the country; an Irish Tet offensive, you might call it. The situation grew so grave that Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan fanatic who had just beheaded his own king for alleged Catholic leanings, invaded Ireland and put city after city to the torch; in the town of Drogheda alone, he massacred more than 4000 people. After he had "pacified" Ireland, Cromwell accelerated the expropriation of Irish land and the importation of Protestant settlers. By 1660, the British had seized 12,000,000 out of 15,000,000 arable acres in Ireland.

After Cromwell's death, the Irish saw a vain glimmer of hope in the Stuart restoration. King James II was a secret Catholic and favorably disposed to the Irish. But then James was deposed and exiled by William of Orange, a staunch Dutch Protestant. James landed in Ireland to organize a war to regain his throne, and Irish Catholics rallied behind him; but after a bloody campaign, he was decisively defeated by the armies of King William at the Battle of the Boyne--July 1, 1690. That battle snuffed out the Irish Catholics' last real hope of freedom. From then on, Protestant hegemony over Ireland was total. The Orangemen still celebrate the Battle of the Boyne each year with huge parades. One of these, in 1969, triggered the rioting that led to the present crisis. Members of the Orange Order, a fascist group that effectively controlled Ulster until recently, used to recite an old toast on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne:

To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of King William III, who saved us from Rogues and Roguery, Slaves and Slavery, Popes and Popery; and whoever denies this toast may he be slammed, crammed and jammed into the muzzle of the great gun of Athlone, and the gun fired into the Pope's belly, and the Pope into the Devil's belly, and the Devil into Hell, and the door locked and the key kept in an Orangeman's pocket.

In Northern Ireland, the Battle of the Boyne is still being fought.

[Q] Playboy: That's what baffles people around the world. Admittedly, Britain invaded and ultimately conquered Ireland, but she also colonized North America, India and a host of countries in Africa and Asia; and once those countries gained independence, they were able to establish friendly relations with the British. Why should hatred and bitterness persist in Ireland to this day?

[A] Devlin: Because the British persist, for one thing. They still occupy half our country, and still shoot down our people when they protest, or intern and torture them without trial. And even in the Republic of Ireland, which is "independent" on paper, England completely controls the economy and thus dominates the state politically. As long as the British presence persists, the people's consciousness of historic injustice will persist with it. We've been left too many dead to forget. We remember the Battle of the Boyne not only because it was followed by military measures to sup press the Catholic population; it was also followed by a series of Irish Parliamentary acts known as the Penal Laws, which even more effectively ensured the supremacy of the Protestant landlords.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Devlin: Catholics were denied their own schools--which in those days meant they had no schools at all--and forbidden to carry arms, acquire land or intermarry with Protestants. In a rural agricultural society where a farmer's main asset was a horse, a Catholic was required by law to sell his horse on the spot to any Protestant who offered him the minimal sum of five pounds. Catholics were denied the vote, or any other participation in the political process, and Protestants were legally entitled to "strike down, cane or horsewhip" any Catholic who behaved in a "disreputable" manner. The Nazis would have been proud of the Penal Laws; torture was an accepted method of enforcement. For 100 years after the enactment of the Penal Laws, the Irish were so cowed that they accepted the British yoke without any significant struggle.

[Q] Playboy: When did modern Irish nation alism first manifest itself?

[A] Devlin: I think you can trace its roots back to the time of the French Revolution. Until then, the British had very cleverly manipulated religious differences between the native Catholics and the Protestant settlers. But by the end of the 18th Century, the descendants of the Scots colonists had been in Ireland for almost 200 years; many of them felt themselves more Irish than British and were ready to make common cause with their Catholic neighbors against the inequities of British rule. In 1798, a great humanist revolutionary, Wolfe Tone, who was himself a Presbyterian, led a nationwide rebellion. The new green flag of a united Ireland flew over North and South for a few days--until the revolt was brutally crushed by the British army. Tone himself was sentenced to be hanged in Dublin and thousands of his followers were executed.

Shortly afterward, the British pushed through an Act of Union between England and Ireland; Ireland was then formally a part of the United Kingdom, and hopes for Irish nationhood were postponed for another 100 years. To safeguard their rule, the British preyed on the worst instincts and deepest insecurities of the Protestants. The situation was a bit as it was in your own American South, where the powers that be fanned racial prejudice in order to prevent an alliance of poor whites and blacks. Throughout the 19th Century, nationalist agitation persisted in Ireland, but it was always weakened by British success in enlisting the Protestant majority as shock troops to perpetuate English rule. And as the Industrial Revolution reached the North of Ireland in the mid--19th Century, the poverty and degradation of the workers deepened--at the same time the great potato famines were driving millions off the land.

[Q] Playboy: Most Americans are familiar with the potato famine only because it brought hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants to our shores. What impact did it have in Ireland?

[A] Devlin: Well, in 1800, the population of Ireland was 5,000,000--substantially more than it is today. By the 1840s, it had grown tremendously, to over 8,000.000 people. The majority were poverty-stricken Catholic peasants who eked out a miserable living from small plots of bare land. They stayed alive by growing potatoes, which produced the best crop their poor earth could yield. All the great and bountiful farms, of course, were owned by the absentee landlords. When the potato blight first struck, in the late 1830s, the poor Catholic farmers were hardest hit. They had no savings; there was no public welfare; when their potato crop perished, they were condemned to starvation. During the height of the famine, between 1845 and 1847, almost 2,000,000 people died or emigrated to America and Australia. The poorest farming class was wiped out completely, either by starvation or by the diseases that swept the countryside after the famine.

It's a matter of historical record that the British could have prevented this mass starvation. Throughout the famine, Ireland was exporting to England more than enough food to feed every victim of the famine. But at the highest levels of the British government, it was decided quite cold-bloodedly that London should not "interfere with the course of nature." After all, the famine was thinning the potentially rebellious Catholic population. The British could have stopped the famine, but they didn't. That wasn't politics; it was genocide.

[Q] Playboy: This tragedy must have intensified the Catholics' hatred of England and the Protestants.

[A] Devlin: Immediately after the famine, the great majority of the surviving Catholics were too numbed to think of any thing but their own day-to-day survival. When they recovered somewhat, their first political effort was a campaign to save the remaining tenant farmers from eviction by absentee landlords and real-estate speculators. The weapon devised was the boycott, whereby the Catholics would withhold all work and services from offending landlords. The term originates with Captain Boycott, a Protestant landowner's agent in Mayo who was one of the movement's first targets.

While these protests were growing, Irish nationalists in Parliament were demanding legislative freedom for Ireland through "home rule," which was much less than independence but would have freed Ireland of some of the worst excesses of colonialism. In the 1880s, the Liberal British prime minister, William Gladstone, introduced a home-rule bill, but he was opposed by the Tory imperialists and the bill was ultimately killed in the House of Lords. Agitation persisted, intensified by the formation of the radical nationalist group Sinn Fein. The Fenians, as they were called, were roundly condemned by both the Church and middle-class nationalists, but their support grew rapidly and the British, alarmed, finally granted Ireland limited home rule in 1914.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't that action cool things down?

[A] Devlin: The Protestant ruling class, which was concentrated in Ulster, bitterly opposed home rule and threatened to resist by force. The Orange Order succeeded somehow in convincing the bulk of Protestant workers in the North that "Home rule was Rome rule," and they pledged to fight to the death to prevent it. This Protestant intransigence intimidated London; World War One had just started and England couldn't afford civil war in Northern Ireland. As a result, implementation of home rule was delayed until a year after the war.

But in Ireland, the most militant nationalists didn't want home rule, whether implemented or not. They wanted an independent Irish Republic. Secretly, the Sinn Fein and other allied organizations formed the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, fore runners of the present Irish Republican Army; and on Easter Monday, 1916, they struck. The Dublin Post Office and other key public buildings were seized and the British army was taken completely by surprise. Within a few hours, the rebels controlled the center of the city and proclaimed the independent Irish Republic. But through confusion and mismanagement, other rebel forces across the country failed to rise in unison, and after a week of bloody fighting in Dublin, the rebels were forced to surrender.

When the rebellion was over, Dublin was burning, set afire by British shells; the heart of the city was in ruins; hundreds had died and thousands were wounded. Within three weeks, 4000 people were arrested and 14 leaders of the rebellion, including the great Socialist labor leader James Connolly and the poet Patrick Pearse, were executed by British soldiers in a courtyard of the Kilmainham jail. But the British imperial power had been struck a mortal blow. At first, many Irish people had opposed the rebellion as a mad act, but after these executions, their revulsion at British rule was bitter and absolute. In a few days of murder, the British had liquidated some of the most popular and influential political leaders in Ireland; the hopes of a generation had fallen before British rifles. But the martyrs of the Rising would haunt English power in Ireland for the next 50 years. The Irish were in no mood to forget.

[Q] Playboy: And yet within six years of the Easter Rising, the British had withdrawn from Southern Ireland. Doesn't that contradict your image of a bloodthirsty power intent on maintaining its rule at any cost?

[A] Devlin: First of all, they withdrew only from Southern Ireland. They're still in the North and their troops are still gunning down our people, 56 years after the Rising. And even in the South, they were driven out after five years of bloody struggle. I think it's unfortunate that people around the world know so little about Irish history. They look at their newspaper and TV reports of what's happening today and just throw up their hands in despair, thinking we're all mad. The fact is, of course, that today's violence is just the culmination of a long historic process. But even Irishmen can grow emotionally and physically exhausted with the struggle and just give up for a time. That's one reason you have a government in Dublin today that has in effect washed its hands of the North and accepted the permanent partition of Ireland.

[Q] Playboy: What led to the partition?

[A] Devlin: After the Rising, the majority of Protestants--who had been whipped into a frenzy of fear by their right-wing leaders--banded together in Ulster, where they pledged to make a last stand. Their battle cry was "Unionism"--continued union with Great Britain. When a nationwide plebiscite was finally held, in 1918, the vote was 80 percent for a united, independent Ireland; but Lloyd George's British government stubbornly refused to grant anything more than limited home rule. The British attempted to suppress the nationalist movement by force of arms, and full-scale war broke out in 1919. That was when the British recruited their own Gestapo, the infamous Black and Tans, from the dregs of prisons throughout the empire--and set them loose on the Irish populace in a campaign of murder, rape and torture.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe these atrocities were deliberately engineered?

[A] Devlin: I do, because they were. Recently released British cabinet records prove that the Black and Tans did not commit isolated "excesses," as the British always claimed, but that they were encouraged in their crimes by Lloyd George himself. He created the Tans as an instrument of terror, designed to break the spirit of the Irish people. In this, they were a dismal failure. By the end of 1921, after three years of fighting, in which thousands of Irishmen were killed and countless villages burned, the British had failed to crush the resistance movement.

In desperation, Lloyd George agreed to a compromise solution: Southern Ireland, which was overwhelmingly Catholic, could be a commonwealth known as the Irish Free State, with status something like that of the Dominion of Canada; but those counties of Northern Ireland with Protestant majorities could "opt out" if they so desired. That was the gist of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed December 6, 1921, and it was a great defeat for Irish independence. Six Northern counties, containing 1,000,000 Protestants, did opt out--and that's partly responsible for the violence there today.

[Q] Playboy: As a professed believer in self-determination for all peoples, don't you grant the Northern Protestants the right to remain with Britain, if that's the desire of the majority?

[A] Devlin: The partition of Ireland was no more acceptable to farseeing Irishmen than the secession of your own Southern states was to Abraham Lincoln. If you'd taken a plebiscite within the Confederacy in 1861, you would have found that a majority of Southerners preferred to split off from the United States. Lincoln put the good of the entire country ahead of regional sectarianism, and this led to your Civil War. In Ireland, too, we had civil war--between the government of the new Irish Free State and the militant Republicans.

[Q] Playboy: A civil war won by the Irish leaders who accepted partition.

[A] Devlin: Oh, they won, all right. And in the process, the hopes of the Irish people for social progress and human dignity were brutally crushed. The rulers of the Free State, who had the support of the Church and the Irish middle class--and, tacitly and ironically, of the British and the Unionists in the North--wanted no social revolution, only a nice tidy little bourgeois capitalist country, rigidly Roman Catholic and linked to Britain by preferential trade agreements. They ruthlessly suppressed the I. R. A. rebels, hundreds of whom were shot by their old comrades in arms. By the mid-Twenties, our revolution had been sold down the river and the Irish people, North and South, faced two enemies: the British and the Dublin government.

[Q] Playboy: Many people would contend that the leaders who eventually accepted partition were not traitors but realists. Wasn't partition preferable to another 10 or 15 years of armed struggle?

[A] Devlin: Most historians believe the British would have caved in completely if the Irish negotiating team had just held on a little longer. The British public had suffered terribly in the first war; they were fed up with the mess in Ireland. Lloyd George knew his own political survival depended upon negotiating immediate British withdrawal. He would have been ready to surrender Ulster if the Irish had presented a united front. But, tragically, we played right into his hands, and the result was the loss of half our country, the continued exploitation of our people in the North and, ultimately, the institutionalization of a reactionary and corrupt capitalist regime in the South, which was just as rotten as the Protestant caste system in the North. James Connolly, who if he'd lived might have tipped the scales against partition, summed it up better than I can when he said 75 years ago:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole army of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

Sure, we did get our own flag after partition, and that's about all we got. We didn't even get half a loaf; we lost the whole bakery.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to Catholics in the North after partition?

[A] Devlin: The new Unionist regime made a deliberate decision to drive out as many Roman Catholics as possible in order to increase their numerical majority, which was roughly two to one. Some Catholics packed and headed south, but the overwhelming majority refused to leave. Threats, economic reprisals, violence--all were used against them. Protestant employers fired Catholic employees; those who kept their jobs were harassed by vigilante goon squads. For the military arm of this violence, Stormont, Northern Ireland's Parliament, formed the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B Specials, whose members were recruited from the most fanatic cadres of the Orange Order. The B Specials carried on the tradition of the Black and Tans, executing Nationalist leaders, burning down Catholic homes--often with the occupants inside--and indiscriminately terrorizing the countryside.

[Q] Playboy: Had Catholics no protection under the law?

[A] Devlin: No. It was a legally sanctioned reign of terror. In 1922, Stormont passed the Special Powers Act, which gave the authorities power to arrest people without a warrant on suspicion "of acting or of having acted or of being about to act" in a manner prejudicial to the state--and to hold them for indefinite periods without charge or trial. Under the act, the police had the right to search persons and premises without a judicial warrant, to close roads or bridges, to declare curfews, to prohibit meetings, to arrest any individual who "by word of mouth" spreads false reports or makes false statements, to suppress the circulation of any newspaper, film or gramophone record and to arrest and hold--without trial, habeas corpus or the right to consult a lawyer--anyone doing anything calculated to be "prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order" in Northern Ireland. The act explicitly authorized punishment by flogging for a host of lesser offenses. One of its most relevant provisions is the clause denying an inquest to any prisoner who died while in custody; this was most useful to the B Specials, since they fatally tortured so many of their prisoners.

The Special Powers Act is still in force in Northern Ireland, and during the present troubles, over 1000 people have been interned without trial under its provisions. It's a kind of Magna Charta for tyrants. There isn't a law like it on the books anywhere else in western Europe; even fascist dictatorships like those in Spain and Portugal haven't dared outrage world opinion by passing such unabashedly repressive legislation. When South Africa was debating security measures a few years ago, the South African minister of the interior told Parliament that he would exchange his whole battery of repressive legislation for just one clause of the Special Powers Act. That's the type of law and order we've been living under in the North for 50 years.

[Q] Playboy: If conditions are so bad, why has there been no outcry until recently?

[A] Devlin: Why didn't the German opposition march in the streets against Hitler in 1938? Because they knew they'd end up in concentration camps.

[Q] Playboy: Most observers will grant that Northern Ireland was set up as a vehicle for Protestant supremacy; but in recent years, the more enlightened Ulster political leaders have recognized the necessity of full Catholic participation in the life of the state. Doesn't violent Catholic resistance, in which you've participated, actually retard progress?

[A] Devlin: What you don't seem to understand is that things began to change only after we started our resistance, a resistance that began peacefully and grew violent only in the face of persistent Unionist violence against us. Until 1968, when we started actively opposing the system, not one iota of reform had been initiated by Stormont. We faced institutionalized discrimination in every area of our life: To be born Catholic was to be born a second-class citizen. Take employment: In Northern Ireland, the unemployment rate is eight percent of the adult male population, but the overwhelming majority of those without jobs has always been Catholic. In Derry, the figure rises to between 12 and 15 percent; in other Catholic areas, it soars as high as 45 percent.

Practically all the major industry in Northern Ireland is Protestant-controlled and has traditionally followed discriminatory hiring practices. Belfast's biggest single employer, the Harlan-Wolff shipyards, has 10,000 workers; 400 of them are Catholics. The situation is just as bad in public employment, which provides a wide range of jobs; most of these positions are filled by local councils; and since Unionist gerrymandering ensures that these are preponderantly Protestant, they tend to award all the good jobs to fellow Protestants.

[Q] Playboy: Hasn't the housing situation been almost as sore a point as unemployment among Catholics?

[A] Devlin: Yes. The housing picture is bleak. Public housing, like public employment, is allocated by the local councils and, once again, they've followed a preferential policy on behalf of Protestants. Between 1945 and 1969, in County Fermanagh, which has a Catholic majority, the county council erected 1589 houses; of these, 1021 went to Protestants. Catholics are allowed to live only in Catholic ghetto areas, which restricts their vote to a few districts. If there's no room in the ghetto, that's their hard luck; they don't get a house. Some have been on the waiting list for 15 years.

[Q] Playboy: Did they protest?

[A] Devlin: Of course--but what could be done? Catholics certainly had no appeal to the courts; the great majority of the judges were diehard Unionists. And the vote was virtually worthless as an instrument of change, since the Unionists had developed a crooked electoral system to keep themselves on top. In all local elections, businessmen were given extra votes; and you had to own property to be able to vote at all. Since very few Catholics were property owners, over 250,000 people were effectively disenfranchised. You can see what we faced at the time our civil rights movement be gan: a completely closed system.

[Q] Playboy: How did the civil rights movement get its start?

[A] Devlin: It was formed in 1967 by a group of middle-class Roman Catholics who had been influenced by the progress of the black civil rights movement in your own country. They called the new organization the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. At first it restricted itself to investigating individual complaints of public discrimination; but after a year it broadened its program and asked for six reforms. These were simple: one man, one vote; an end to gerrymandering; anti-discrimination legislation; impartial allocation of public housing; repeal of the Special Powers Act; and disbanding of the B Specials. These were eminently reasonable and moderate demands, but their implementation would have had a revolutionary effect on the Northern Irish social structure. It was a revolution that Stormont and the nine percent of the Protestants who owned 92 percent of the land in Ulster were determined to resist.

[Q] Playboy: When did you first become active in the civil rights movement?

[A] Devlin: In 1968, at the very beginning of the activist phase of the movement. I was in my last year at Queen's University in Belfast, commuting from Cooks-town each day so I could take care of the family. I used to work in my uncle's pub in Cookstown after school, and I'd hear people complaining over drinks, but nobody was doing anything. One day I heard that the civil rights movement was planning a march to protest public discrimination. I said to myself, "By God, I'll be there!" And I went. It was a great success. Over 4000 people showed up, and we all felt a marvelous sense of solidarity.

[Q] Playboy: What was the attitude of the authorities?

[A] Devlin: A sort of restrained hostility. Our prime minister at the time was Captain Terence O'Neill, a wealthy Protestant landlord who fancied himself something of a public-relations expert. He was trying to clean up the sectarian image of Ulster without correcting any of its specific injustices. This put him in something of the position of Adolf Hitler commemorating Brotherhood Week, but it fooled a lot of well-meaning people. The civil rights movement caught O'Neill by surprise, and he and his cronies made a crucial mistake: Instead of adopting a tolerant line and throwing out a few sops that might have co-opted the middle-class element, they treated the whole movement as some kind of sinister conspiracy between Dublin and the I. R. A. During the first march, the police behaved properly enough, although they blockaded us from the Protestant part of town; but six weeks later, on October 5, 1968, when the next march was held in Derry, they brutally suppressed it.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Devlin: The same thing that happened during your Chicago Democratic Convention that year: The police went mad. You must understand that Derry has always been the powder keg of Northern Ireland. The city has a tremendous emotional appeal to Protestants. In 1689, it held out against a Catholic siege for 105 days, buying the Protestants time for the eventual victory at the Battle of the Boyne. As a result, Derry became the visible symbol of Protestant courage. But Derry also has a large Catholic majority and some of the worst housing conditions, political repression and unemployment in the country.

When plans for the march to Derry were announced, Unionist politicians and newspapers mounted a hysterical propaganda campaign, and right-wing Protestant extremists, led by Ian Paisley, threatened violent countermeasures. Once public feeling had been sufficiently whipped up, the minister for home affairs, William Craig--the same man who's now the leader of the paramilitary fascist movement called Vanguard-- banned the meeting. The Civil Rights Association decided to march anyway, and far more people showed up than would have appeared if the government had ignored us.

I'll never forget the atmosphere in Derry that day. The very air seemed to crackle with emotional electricity. We all had a tremendous feeling of being alive, of finally taking a stand for something important, and to hell with the consequences. But we could see right away that the attitude of the Royal Ulster Constabulary was very different from what it had been on the earlier march. We had only moved a few hundred yards before the police came toward us. When we tried to regroup down the side streets, they encircled us. There were hundreds of them, and with no act of physical or verbal violence on our part, they came charging in swinging their truncheons right and left, kicking and punching everyone in their way. People panicked and started to run, but there was no place to go. I panicked, too. I stood there like a statue, watching people being clubbed all around me. The thing I remember most clearly to this very day is the expression on the faces of the police--their tight thick smiles, their eager eyes. They were enjoying it. It was as if they had waited 50 years for this.

[Q] Playboy: What was the public reaction to this brutality?

[A] Devlin: I think the impact on public opinion was something like what happened after Dr. King's people were beaten up by Bull Connor's policemen on that bridge in Alabama. Suddenly, fair-minded people everywhere could see us being treated like animals. In the aftermath of the violence, I was so furious I could have gone into a police barracks with a machine gun and slaughtered everyone there. But in retrospect, I realize the police had actually done us a great favor. They dramatized our plight to the world. The civil rights movement had started out as a small middle-class pressure group, but it took only one day of police violence to transform it into a mass movement.

[Q] Playboy: What accounted for your own rapid rise from participant to leader?

[A] Devlin: Right after the police violence in Derry, students from Queen's University--Protestant and Catholic alike, all infuriated by the police brutality--decided to form our own nonsectarian civil rights organization to appeal to Protestant workers as well as to Catholics. This was the birth of People's Democracy, as we called ourselves. At the meeting, the students chose a "faceless committee" of ten people to steer the organization. I was one of them. We were chosen precisely because we were nobodies, just ordinary working-class students. That was the beginning of my leadership role in the resistance movement, though God knows I didn't anticipate any such thing at the time. I expected to stay faceless.

[Q] Playboy: What role did your new organization play?

[A] Devlin: Well, at first, P. D. was just a protest movement without any clearly defined political program. But under pressure of events, it moved rapidly to the left of the Civil Rights Association. We came to see ourselves as a socialist revolutionary group. We didn't want to clean up the system; we wanted to destroy it, uniting Catholic and Protestant workers against the system in both Belfast and Dublin. And that far the C. R. A. was not willing to go.

Unfortunately, by aligning ourselves, however critically, with the C. R. A., we ultimately lost our chance to win the support of the Protestant working class. That was the basic contradiction within the civil rights movement: Did we want political equality for Catholics or social and economic justice for all? It's never been resolved.

[Q] Playboy: What were the events that propelled People's Democracy leftward?

[A] Devlin: The one happening that most accelerated our militant swing was our "Long March" from Belfast to Derry in January 1969. In the wake of the police violence at our previous march in October, Prime Minister O'Neill was pressured by the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, to pacify Ulster. In November. O'Neill announced a "reform program," in which a few of the C. R. A.'s demands were adopted: An Ombudsman was appointed to investigate complaints of discrimination, and the extra votes for business were abolished--but universal adult suffrage was still not granted and the Special Powers Act was kept on the books. The reforms were just window dressing, but they fooled many middle-class Catholics. The C. R. A. called a moratorium on demon strations to show its support for O'Neill, who was under heavy fire from Paisleyites and right-wing Unionists who couldn't stomach any concession, no matter how insignificant. But we in P. D. weren't taken in, and we called a march from Belfast to Derry on New Year's Day 1969. We expected trouble on the way, and we got it.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics have claimed that by refusing to give O'Neill a chance to implement his reforms, your members were responsible for the subsequent violence.

[A] Devlin: That's nonsense. First of all, O'Neill's so-called reforms never had a chance to begin with, because they touched only the surface of the sickness in Northern Ireland. O'Neill was like a doctor prescribing aspirin for terminal cancer. And the violence you speak of was all directed at us. We were harassed all along the route by roving bands of Paisleyites, and about seven miles out side Derry, we were ambushed by a large crowd of heavily armed Unionists. The police, who were allegedly protecting us, just stood back and let them wade into us, throwing bottles and stones and swinging clubs and crowbars. We were trapped on a field between the river and the Burntollet Bridge. Many marchers were mercilessly beaten and thrown into the water; I saw young girls being hurled off the bridge by Paisleyites, whose accomplices would wait below and beat them with nail-studded clubs when they tried to swim to the bank.

I recognized the futility of running and stood still. One Paisleyite swung a huge plank at me, and I still remember it coming toward my eyes, with two big nails sticking out. I threw my hands across my face and the nails drove into the backs of my hands. Luckily, my reflexes were quick; otherwise, I would have been blinded. Then the man slammed me across the knees and I fell to the ground. Four or five of his mates gathered around me, trying to kick my face in. I curled into a ball, covering my head with my arms, while their boots slammed into me. Finally, they trotted off after a new victim. I lay there a minute or two, then raised my head and looked around. The field was a shambles, with the battered bodies of marchers strewn on the ground like driftwood. It was a miracle nobody died at the Burntollet ambush, but 87 people were admitted to hospitals, many of them seriously injured.

The ambush taught us all we needed to know about the "reformist" government of Terence O'Neill. The radicalization of Northern Ireland was really under way now. In February, O'Neill, shaken by the growing opposition from both left and right, decided to call national elections for Stormont. P. D. decided to contest the elections, and to my own considerable surprise, I found myself a candidate.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you consent to participate in the elections of a system you despised?

[A] Devlin: My running was purely a matter of tactics. At first, I was opposed to the idea, because I'd always considered Parliamentary politics a sham. But on reflection, I realized that our participation in the campaign would give us valuable publicity and allow us to bring a socialist program to thousands of people who had never been exposed to our arguments before. We never expected--or desired--to win any seats. We fielded eight candidates in all, opposing both Unionist and Catholic nationalist candidates, and I contested one of the most entrenched Unionist seats of all, the one in South Derry held by Major James Chichester-Clark, then the minister of agriculture and soon to become our prime minister. I stumped the district, arguing for a nonsectarian socialist alternative, and once the initial incredulity and hostility died down, I began to find a receptive audience.

When the balloting was over, I had received over a third of the vote in that Unionist stronghold, 5812 against Chichester-Clark's 9195. I stood next to him at the polling place while the votes were counted, and his face grew progressively greener as the returns rolled in; he had never been seriously challenged before, much less by a grubby little street urchin like me. It was the same across the country; wherever P. D. contested a seat, we won a sizable percentage of the vote. We didn't win any seats, but for the first time in 50 years the powers that be felt threatened. Suddenly, we were a political power to be reckoned with.

[Q] Playboy: Was it your strong showing in the Stormont elections that led you to run for the British Parliament?

[A] Devlin: Indirectly, yes. It was actually the whole chain of events from the October march on Derry through the Burntollet ambush to the 1969 general election that led me to Parliament. You see, Ulster--under the fiction that it's an integral part of the United Kingdom--elects 12 Members of Parliament to sit in Westminster. Within a month of the February elections, one of the members, a Unionist named George Forrest, died. He'd represented mid-Ulster, where I lived, for 12 years, in the course of which he hadn't once opened his mouth in Parliament. When he died, his widow was encouraged to run for the seat, and the opposition looked around for a candidate to oppose her.

There was a lot of friction in those days between Republicans and Catholic nationalists, and finally, representatives of both factions came to see me. They had been impressed by my showing in South Derry, they said, and were willing to withdraw their own respective candidates and unite behind me. I was a bit surprised and somewhat apprehensive; I didn't want to get caught up in the morass of Parliamentary politics and give everybody a chance to say, "Look at those so-called revolutionaries in P. D. They're just as careerist as everybody else." But if the opposition couldn't agree on a candidate, the vote would be split and the Unionist candidate would walk in. And as a nonsectarian socialist, I could appeal to Protestant votes, which would be lost to a traditional Catholic candidate. So, reluctantly, I agreed to run.

[Q] Playboy: Did you expect to win?

[A] Devlin: God, no. That was the last thought in my head. I wanted to show Stormont we were still alive and kicking, but I never dreamed I could win a majority. I didn't pull any punches in my socialist position, nor did I hedge my criticism of the Catholic Church. And a strange thing happened: The more radical and outrageous my speeches, the more cheers they got. I'd stand up and lambaste Catholic sectarianism and then find a line of priests waiting to pump my hand afterward. Not for the first time, I'd underestimated the depth of resistance to the system and the intensity of popular bitterness.

As election day approached, my campaign was gaining steadily, but I still didn't believe I had any chance of victory; in fact, I didn't want to believe it. The very idea was frightening. And then on election day, April 17, 1969, the results came in and both my best hopes and worst fears were confirmed. I had won, with 33,648 votes to Mrs. Forrest's 29,437. I was 21 years old and a member of the mother of Parliaments. A pretty intimidating thought.

[Q] Playboy: Your election made you the youngest Member of Parliament since 1781, and an overnight celebrity. How did all the publicity affect you?

[A] Devlin: It was overwhelming. I had no privacy at all. Taken as a whole, the press behaved in a disgusting and totally insensitive manner. I tried to talk to the reporters about my political program, the problems in Northern Ireland and how I believed they could be corrected. They were completely uninterested; they would brush aside my political remarks and say: "C'mon, Bernadette, get into bed, we want to photograph you having breakfast in bed." And that was the mentality of the whole press corps. If you're going to report on an M. P. who's female and 21, well, the only place to do it is in bed, because she's got to be sexy or you won't sell newspapers. They kept trying to photograph me on our garden swing--probably for its cheesecake value. They told me they wanted to caption the photos: "Ireland's swinging M. P." God, even their puns were bad.

When I left for London to take my seat in Parliament, I was wearing a crumpled pair of jeans and an old sweater, so I decided to buy a dress. The press found out about it and mobbed me while I was shopping in Carnaby Street. I made the mistake of buying a striped miniskirt, to their delight, and now I was not only a swinging M. P., I was a swinging miniskirted M. P. It would have been funny, in a pathetic way, if it weren't for the situation back home, which was getting worse every day. But I couldn't get through to the press and finally I just told them to go to hell. You can see how long my honey moon with the press lasted: In April of 1969, the London Daily Mirror headlined a photo of me, "She's Young, She's Swinging, She's M.P. for Mid-Ulster." By August, the same paper ran an editorial titled "The Shame of Bernadette."

[Q] Playboy: What was the reaction of the general public to your election?

[A] Devlin: Well, in Ireland it was divided pretty much down political lines. One Unionist leader called me "Ireland's greatest national disaster since the potato famine," and the Reverend Ian Paisley dubbed me "the International Socialist Playmate of the Year." I got a bunch of threatening letters from his supporters, of course. Until you're in the public eye, you never realize how many nuts there are crawling around. And I received dozens of proposals of marriage, mainly from military men who would brag of their superb physique and stamina.

The majority of my correspondents seemed completely uninterested in the Irish situation. I don't think half of them even knew where Ireland was. Still, there was a percentage of serious and honest letters from people genuinely concerned about our problems and interested in my proposed solutions. These letters--from ordinary, decent, concerned people--encouraged me to keep going at times when the antics of the press got me so discouraged I was tempted to throw the whole thing in and retreat to obscurity in Cookstown. I remember the remark a taxi driver made as he dropped me off at Commons. "Only two people in history have ever entered Parliament with honest intentions," he said. "You and Guy Fawkes."

[Q] Playboy: After your election, a number of commentators singled you out as a symbol of modern female emancipation. What do you think of the women's liberation movement?

[A] Devlin: I think it's essentially a very healthy phenomenon. Women need to be freed from their traditionally passive and dependent role in our society. I suppose I am an example of that sort of thing. If I can do it, others can do it. But I must add that I see problems with the women's liberation movement--many of them having to do with the fact that its leadership is so exclusively the province of middle-class female intellectuals and professionals. Liberation for this kind of woman means equality with in the capitalist system. These women aren't saying all women are equal to all other women. They don't address themselves to the problems of working women, much less to the problems of black women. What has to be understood is that women's liberation is never going to come about until we have class liberation. Women simply can't find equality in an inherently unequal society. There's nothing sexist about economic discrimination. Some of the more radical feminists are recognizing this, by recognizing that women's liberation is only one of many issues that must be fought for. The enemy is not men but a capitalist system that deforms men and women alike. To me, the best example of a truly liberated woman is Angela Davis. She's working for female emancipation and for blacks and for poor whites and against the war in Vietnam and against capital ism. All these issues are part of the same struggle.

[Q] Playboy: As an emancipated woman who has grown up in a Roman Catholic society, how do you feel about abortion?

[A] Devlin: Abortion is a personal decision for every woman to make. The state should in no way interfere with that decision. The state has no more right to tell a woman she cannot have an abortion than to tell her she must have one. If you were to ask my purely personal opinion, I would say that I'm opposed to having an abortion myself. But I wouldn't try to inflict my views on anyone else.

[Q] Playboy: You dramatized those views when you stunned many Irish Catholics by announcing that you were having a child out of wedlock and refusing to name the father. Did that hurt you politically in Northern Ireland?

[A] Devlin: I don't think so. I think the Irish people have more important things on their minds than whether or not Bernadette Devlin is pregnant. In any case, my morals are a private matter. I'm not a saint, but I'm an even less interesting sinner.

[Q] Playboy: In any case, your political convictions were more relevant in Parliament than your moral code. What was it like being an M. P. at your age, with your radical beliefs?

[A] Devlin: It was pretty unreal in many ways. When I arrived, everyone bent over backward to be charming to me. The message was clear: I was expected to be grateful and polite and awed and humbled and play the game by their rules. But I refused to be the guest of honor at garden parties or the attraction at cocktail parties and dinners. That wasn't my world and I wanted no part of it. Even after a few days in Parliament, I could see the phoniness and the hypocrisy of the place, the way its members were a pampered elite who cared little or nothing about their constituents. They were there to serve the real rulers: the giant banks, the big industrial interests, the whole British ruling class that still ruthlessly oppresses the average worker, despite the welfare-state sops they've dispensed to keep him in line. I came to hold Parliament and its members in contempt.

[Q] Playboy: Then why did you continue to serve there?

[A] Devlin: Because I could use it as a platform for my ideas. Ideally, I'd like to use my presence in Parliament to destroy it, rather as the Bolsheviks did when they joined the Duma. But I'd be deluding myself if I thought I could do that on my own. In any case, Parliament isn't a natural place for somebody like me. I'd much rather be out on the streets fighting the system; in fact, with in a few months of my election, I was serving time in jail. And all in all, I prefer jail to Parliament; you meet a better class of people there.

[Q] Playboy: Why were you sent to jail?

[A] Devlin: I got into street fighting. On April 19, 1969, there was a clash in Deny between Paisleyites and a group of civil rights supporters staging a sit-down protest. Instead of trying to separate the two sides, the police started cracking Catholic skulls. The incident blew up into a full-scale riot between police and residents of the Bogside, the Catholic ghetto. The police went berserk, causing the first Catholic fatality of the present unrest. Samuel Devenney, a 43-year-old man with a weak heart, was clubbed to death--in the parlor of his small council house. This incident infuriated Catholics across Northern Ireland; their disillusion with the police was complete. The violence accelerated and Prime Minister O'Neill resigned on April 28. My old friend Major Chichester-Clark took his place and promptly began appeasing the Unionist right, assuring them there would be no more "concessions" to the Catholics.

Then, in Derry on the 12th of July, Protestant marchers, celebrating the Battle of the Boyne, clashed with Catholics. Out of sheer frustration and bitterness, the Catholic Bogsiders tore their ghetto apart, rather like black rioters in Harlem or Watts. The violence quickly spread to other parts of the country. Mercifully, there were no dead, but Ulster was a powder keg, and the spark was provided on August 12, 1969, by the Orange Apprentice Boys' procession. By its very nature, this march, which commemorates the young Protestant apprentices who closed the city gates in 1689 and rallied the Protestant populace to withstand that Catholic siege, was a provocation to the Catholic community. Responsible Protestant and Catholic civic leaders begged the government to cancel or postpone it until tempers on both sides had time to cool, but Chichester-Clark refused to intervene and the stage was set for the worst violence in Northern Ireland in 53 years.

[Q] Playboy: Violence in which you participated.

[A] Devlin: Yes, I participated and I'm glad I did. But I didn't start any violence or encourage it; the police did that. While thousands of Protestant marchers were parading around Derry's wall, a Catholic kid shot some marbles at them from a slingshot. A bunch of Orangemen began throwing stones at the Catholics and within moments a full-scale riot was under way. Once it was begun, our gloriously impartial police force distinguished itself by charging the Catholic crowd.

What was vastly underestimated was the bitterness and determination of the Bogsiders; within minutes, the police were retreating under a hail of rocks and petrol bombs from surrounding rooftops. The police charged again, and again they were driven back. It was a group of children in their early teens who were throwing the petrol bombs, which were being manufactured by their mothers and younger brothers and sisters. After another police charge was repulsed, the citizens and the Bogsiders poured into the streets and began erecting makeshift barricades out of planks and paving stones.

I was there that day and I pitched in to help build the barricades. Pregnant women and young girls and kids ten and eleven struggled beside me, while the older men fought off the police attacks. The police replied to our stones with their own and then with clouds of CS gas--the first time such gas had ever been used in the United Kingdom, by the way. We carried on by covering our faces with handkerchiefs soaked in sodium bicarbonate--homemade gas masks--and volunteers set up field hospitals.

The police made charge after charge, but we kept pushing them back. My arm ached from throwing rocks at the bastards. Then we realized we were winning! It was open, glorious insurrection. We were beating the police, driving them back from the Bogside. On that day, free Derry was born. The course of Irish history has never been the same since.

[Q] Playboy: You seem proud of your role in the Bogside rioting. But a British government inquiry concluded that you "must bear a degree of responsibility for encouraging Bogsiders to resist the police with violence," thus contributing significantly to subsequent bloodshed. Do you deny that responsibility?

[A] Devlin: I certainly don't deny that I encouraged people to resist the police. I'm proud of that. But I would deny your implication that the ensuing violence was my responsibility or the responsibility of the people behind the barricades in Derry. You must remember, there were only two things I could have done in the Bogside as the barricades started to go up: I could have said "No, you're wrong, don't do that" and argued with people to take them down, or I could have stayed around to help the wounded. Those were the two honorable courses; but, as it turned out, all the "respectable" politicians who'd been in the area pleading for calm and forbearance ran off the minute it looked as if there was going to be trouble. I'm not made that way. Those were my people, that was my fight and I decided to stay and face the consequences.

[Q] Playboy: But wasn't it your duty to try to prevent violence and rioting?

[A] Devlin: It couldn't be prevented. The police were invading our neighborhood. I had no control over their actions. In fact, our resistance in the Bogside averted more tragedy; if the police had stormed the barricades, there would have been a dozen innocent people like Samuel Devenney murdered--maybe more. We knew that and that's why we fought so desperately for three days and three nights to keep them out. We won. And, as a result, there wasn't a single fatality, Catholic or Protestant, in the Bogside.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there more serious violence elsewhere?

[A] Devlin: Yes. In other parts of the country, the police had their own way and ran wild. The worst bloodshed was in Belfast. Things were truly terrible there. When word spread about our success in Deny, Orangemen stormed the Catholic part of Belfast, burning out whole blocks of homes and beating and shooting any Catholic they could lay their hands on. Police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary joined the Protestant mob and the B Specials were called out. Heavily armed Unionist fanatics went on a shooting spree throughout Belfast, firing wildly into Catholic crowds and raking blocks of flats with machine-gun fire.

As the situation deteriorated into a general blood bath, England was forced to send in troops to restore some semblance of order. By the time the troops took up positions in Belfast, eight people had been murdered, 100 had been injured and more than 500 Catholic homes had been burned out. Whole streets were gutted by fire and 1000 people were out of work because their factories and shops had been destroyed. Even the British government report you just quoted admitted that the police had used their B Specials indiscriminately.

[Q] Playboy: You left Ireland before the troops arrived, didn't you?

[A] Devlin: True. Reports of what was happening in Belfast reached us behind the barricades in Derry, and I realized something must be done to raise funds for emergency aid. I was exhausted after three sleepless nights on the barricades, but I slipped out of Derry in an ambulance and escaped across the border to Southern Ireland. That night, I was on a plane for the United States to raise funds for the victims of the rioting.

[Q] Playboy: Some of your critics alleged you were fleeing to escape arrest.

[A] Devlin: I hardly would have returned then, would I? No, I just thought I could do more good raising relief money. For the next two weeks, I devoted all my energies to wheedling money out of American pockets for the suffering people back home.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel you were received in America?

[A] Devlin: Oh, very well. I got the full VIP treatment, in fact. I was given the keys to New York, San Francisco and Detroit. The American press was a little less superficial than its British counterpart, probably because the violence in Ireland had reached a point where they could no longer ignore it. But I still had to wade through interminable questions about my sex life and my lipstick shade and whether I sleep in the raw. The tour itself was brutally exhausting. I'd flown over on the spur of the moment, there'd been no advance work, and my schedule was absolutely chaotic. I appeared on literally hundreds of television shows, gave more interviews than I can remember and staggered from one fund-raising meeting to another. In the two weeks I was in the States, I had less than 24 hours' sleep. I was lucky to get that much. For a while, I was looking back longingly to those tranquil days on the Bogside barricades.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of response did you get from the Irish-American community?

[A] Devlin: A curious one. I spoke to thousands of Irish-Americans across the country, and it was sad to see how many of them were right wing in their political and social attitudes. I deliberately made a comparison between Ulster's Catholics and America's blacks; that was one reason why, right after Mayor Lindsay handed me the key to New York City, I turned it over to the Black Panthers. Of course, there's no doubt I lost a lot of potential contributions by doing this. But I refused to submit to prejudices of the kind of Irish-American who thinks being Irish means nothing more than drinking whiskey, singing folk songs and wearing a shamrock once a year. I'd ask them: "Do you support civil rights in Ireland and, if so, are you doing it because you're Catholic or because you support justice? And if so, are you working to see that your black countrymen are being granted the justice you demand for Ireland? And if not, why not?" Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I had the feeling I got through to at least some bigoted Irish-Americans. I hope so, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Was there much organized opposition to your trip?

[A] Devlin: Not really. Most of the criticism of my trip came from two Unionist members of Stormont, who followed me around as a self-styled "Ulster truth squad" and told everybody I was a "female Castro in a miniskirt." That damned miniskirt again! Ian Paisley's American manager, Reverend Carl Mc-Intire, the anti-Communist fundamentalist, denounced me as "a miniskirted Marxist," and an editorial in one of the Detroit papers called me "a miniskirted Danny the Red." Sometimes I wish I'd stuck to my dungarees.

The only significant Irish Catholic opposition to my trip came from Mayor Daley. The day I arrived in New York, I told the press that the police and B Specials in Ulster were behaving as despicably as the Chicago police had during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Well, that got back to Daley. He called off a Chicago reception for me and urged all Irish-Americans not to contribute any money to our relief fund, to donate it to the Red Cross instead. So I didn't make much financial headway in Chicago. But, in any case, I wouldn't shake that corrupt old boss's hand for the entire U. S. Treasury.

[Q] Playboy: Was your trip a success?

[A] Devlin: No. We raised almost $100,000, but we'd originally set ourselves a goal of $1,000,000. We might have collected more, but I decided to cut the trip short. From the very beginning, I'd pledged that none of the money we raised would contribute in any way to violence. Behind my back, I. R. A. sympathizers were trying to divert the money to purchase machine guns and ammunition. One night in early September, I overheard a conversation between a New York sponsor and one of my associates, who said he was trying to change my position on arms. "Never mind," the New York man said, "we've got the money and that's all that matters." When I heard that, I exploded. I froze the bank account where we had deposited the money raised so far and left for Ireland that night. I must admit that after two weeks in America, I was glad to get back to Ulster, even though a jail sentence awaited me.

[Q] Playboy: What were you charged with?

[A] Devlin: Disorderly behavior, inciting to riot and breach of the peace--all stemming from my stint on the Bogside barricades. In December, I was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. My appeals ran out in June 1970 and I was admitted to a 116-year-old jail in Armagh. It was actually a very valuable experience for me. I wouldn't have missed it for the world-- almost. For one thing, it was the first time in my entire life I'd had an uninterrupted period in which there was nothing to do but sit back and think.

[Q] Playboy: How did the other prisoners relate to you?

[A] Devlin: They never really considered me a criminal in the same sense they were. They all accepted the basic justice of the law, even though many of them claimed they were actually innocent of the specific crimes they had been charged with. My position, on the other hand, was, "Yes, I've done all they said I did, but I think I was right to do it." That was the only difference in our status, however.

[Q] Playboy: How long were you in prison?

[A] Devlin: I served four months of my six-month sentence and was released in October 1970. The only frustrating thing about being behind bars during this period was the growing violence on the outside. I wished I could have been free to do something constructive for my people.

[Q] Playboy: A period of relative calm had followed the arrival of British troops in 1969. What caused the subsequent escalation of hostilities?

[A] Devlin: The British army itself. It's true that when the troops first arrived, many Catholics welcomed their presence and considered them protectors from the police and the armed Orange mob. And I'm sure the average British soldier was a decent enough young fellow, just trying to do his job. When the troops came in, both Stormont and London were treading very carefully. As an emotionally charged concession, Wilson even disarmed and eventually disbanded the B Specials. But slowly and surely, pressure increased in the Catholic ghettos. In June 1970, Wilson was replaced as British prime minister by the Conservative Edward Heath. Whereas Wilson wanted to seduce the Catholics into cooperation, Heath preferred to rape them. Instructions were issued to commanders in the North to take a hard line toward the Catholics.

The turning point was a series of arms searches in the Catholic area of Belfast. A minor incident between soldiers and a few taunting children erupted into a major riot. The military command promptly slapped a curfew on the area and or dered a house-to-house search for concealed weapons. The curfew affected over 15,000 Catholics, and more than 3000 homes were searched. While people choked and wept from the huge amounts of CS gas poured into the area, the troops kicked in doors and smashed and looted many of the houses they searched, roughing up anyone who protested. Residents poured into the streets to demonstrate against this behavior and the troops opened fire: Three Catholics were shot dead and another was crushed to death under an armored car. After that, Catholics understandably began viewing the army as a hostile occupying force. All the good will built up over the past months rapidly disintegrated.

[Q] Playboy: Were many arms discovered in Catholic homes?

[A] Devlin: Very few--some antique revolvers and carbines, a few rounds of old ammunition, that sort of thing. Certainly not the kind of arsenal that could have justified such a massive and brutal invasion of privacy. And Catholic bitterness was intensified by the fact that no similar searches were conducted in Protestant areas. There are 73,000 licensed guns in Northern Ireland, including 700 automatic weapons, and 99 percent of them are in the hands of Protestants. Licenses are granted by the local police inspector, who's invariably a Protestant. These weapons weren't touched, and the one-sided nature of the searches con vinced Catholics that the army was deliberately singling them out for punitive treatment. The main political beneficiary of this and other repressive measures was the I. R. A., which had grown from a handful of unarmed men in 1969 to a small army by January '71. On February sixth, the first British soldier in Northern Ireland died from an I. R. A. bullet. From that point on, we were at war.

[Q] Playboy: When did the I. R. A.'s terror campaign begin?

[A] Devlin: You can trace its latest campaign--and the widening split between the I. R. A.'s official and its more militant Provisional wings--back to the violence in Belfast in August of 1969. When the police and the Paisleyite mob attacked the Catholic ghettos in Belfast with ma chine guns, there were virtually no guns with which to answer them. The I. R. A., as an armed force, didn't exist. It's terribly ironic: The official leadership had sold the I. R. A.'s entire stockpile of arms to some Welsh nationalists, to raise enough money to keep the Sinn Fein newspaper afloat. Caught without weapons in Belfast, the hard-liners were under standably bitter. They broke off and formed the Provisional I. R. A. in January 1970.

Most of the Provos, who've conducted the bulk of the armed resistance, weren't even in the I. R. A. before 1969. In that sense, they really represent a spontaneous uprising of the people that doesn't seem to be fully understood. The I. R. A. hasn't been leading the Irish people but following them. And the army, through its brutality and stupidity, has been the I. R. A.'s best recruiting agent. I know that around the world the I. R. A. has a reputation of being a bunch of bloodthirsty madmen, and I'm not defending all their actions; in fact, in the present situation I have appealed to the Provisionals for an end to military tactics. But the I. R. A. could not exist without the support of the people of the ghettos in which it operates.

[Q] Playboy: You seem quite sympathetic to the I. R. A., and yet you cut short your American trip to keep the money you had raised from being diverted to them. Can you explain this?

[A] Devlin: For one thing, the situation has changed drastically since then. For another, I had given my word no money would go for arms and I wasn't prepared to break it. Had I wanted money for arms, I would have asked for it--and got it. But this isn't a question of being pro-I. R. A. or anti-I. R. A. I disagree absolutely with many things the I. R. A. has done, and I've said so publicly many times. The bombing campaign, for example, has been disastrous, both in its human toll and in the way it has polarized sectarian division and driven Protestant workers into the arms of fascists like Paisley. You'll never bomb the Protestants onto our side, and without Protestant participation in our struggle, we don't have a chance of freeing ourselves from English imperialism.

So I'm not an apologist for the I. R. A. in any sense, but I can understand what has driven the I. R. A. to what it has done, and I get tired of people uttering pious denunciations of I. R. A. violence but never mentioning the systematic violence of the British army. If an I. R. A. man shoots an armed British soldier, that's called murder. But if British troops gun down unarmed Catholic children, somehow that turns out to be self-defense. If the British army would get the hell out of our country, there would be no need for an I. R. A. campaign. When the chips are down, you'll find me on the side of the I. R. A. against the British.

[Q] Playboy: But the I. R. A.'s bombing campaign has killed and mutilated hundreds of innocent people and thrown thousands more out of work by destroying factories and other businesses. How can you have any sympathy for the perpetrators of such atrocities?

[A] Devlin: Desperate people commit desperate acts, even unconscionable acts. But I know many of these men, I know what drives them, and I know they're not the soulless monsters they've been portrayed in the British press. Or in the American press, for that matter. It's strange that the American public should be so repulsed by a bombing campaign conducted on the ground but accept with relative equanimity the aerial bombardment of Vietnam, which has killed a thousand times as many people. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and one man's mass murder is another man's war. It seems strange to me that the same people who talked about secretaries' having their legs blown off in bomb explosions never worried about secretaries when they were underpaid. People may say that's a trite point; it's not. I'm sick of people who worry about the dead but as long as they're underpaid, living in slums, living in starvation, they don't worry.

Military action alone can never win in Vietnam--or in Ireland. We can't be beaten by military means, as the British have learned. But neither can we defeat them that way. Until there is a higher level of political and class consciousness among both Catholics and Protestants, I'm afraid the situation will not be satisfactorily resolved. One thing is clear: Britain has lost Ireland. She still has the territory, yes, but she's lost the people, just as the French did in Algeria, years before they were finally forced out. The British could intern 1,000,000 of us and still not win. There aren't enough jails to hold us all.

[Q] Playboy: What led the British to introduce internment of I. R. A. suspects?

[A] Devlin: In a word, desperation. Through out 1971, the situation grew worse. In March, Chichester-Clark resigned. He had proved as much of a jellyfish as O'Neill and couldn't take the pressures from his right wing. He was replaced by Brian Faulkner, a hard-liner who pushed the army to even greater lengths of oppression. But in the first five months of Faulkner's government, there was an average of two bomb explosions a day, and army casualties steadily mounted. They were killing more and more of us, but the resistance kept growing. The opposition walked out of Stormont, people began rent strikes and massive civil disobedience, and with each new army atrocity, more people swelled the ranks of both wings of the I. R. A.

As his only chance of survival, Faulkner sought internment of all opposition leaders and activists--without trial. On August 9, 1971, he moved. British troops arrested over 500 people in predawn raids, beating many of them in the process. Concentration camps were set up. Faulkner thought this would break the back of the opposition, but--once again--it had just the opposite effect. The people exploded in the most violent outbursts to date: 26 killed, thousands wounded and 7000 refugees driven from their homes, many of them seeking refuge across the border in the Irish Republic. The popular fury increased when it was revealed that the internees were systematically tortured by the army and the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

[Q] Playboy: Has that charge of torture been independently verified?

[A] Devlin: Yes, it has--by Amnesty International, by the International Red Cross, by examining doctors and, implicitly, by investigative commissions of the British government itself. Different forms of torture were used, both mental and physical. The first, euphemistically termed "disorientation," was part of an official "deep interrogation" technique the British army devised to soften up internees for questioning. Many of the men subjected to such treatment--loud noises, denial of sleep, that sort of thing--for long periods suffered nervous break downs. Psychiatrists stated that such brainwashing techniques could be permanently damaging. Prisoners were also forced to do strenuous physical exercises till they could no longer stand; they were taken up in helicopters and told, "This is it, we're throwing you out"; they were "shot" at close range by pistols with blank cartridges; they were stretched over benches with electric fires underneath; they were tortured by electric shocks; they were forced to run blindfolded and barefoot over broken glass down a gauntlet of club-swinging troops; and they were given psychedelic drugs in their food.

I know that to someone who hasn't spoken to victims of this treatment or seen the documentary evidence, it all must sound like a propaganda horror story. But believe me, it's all true. The torture of these helpless men--none of whom had been convicted or even for mally accused of any crime--was a deliberate policy aimed at breaking their spirit and eliciting information. If the British people weren't so uncritical of their darling army, there would have been a national outcry. But there was practically no reaction in England, or in the rest of the world, for that matter. It was left up to us, brothers and daughters and wives and parents of the victims, to protest. And throughout the fall and winter of 1971, we did so. Our largest anti-internment march was in Derry on January 30, 1972--a date that has now passed into Irish history as Bloody Sunday.

[Q] Playboy: What happened on Bloody Sunday?

[A] Devlin: Sometimes it's hard to believe it really did happen. There were over 20,000 people at Derry that day. The government had declared our gathering illegal, but we were going ahead in defiance of the ban. I was on the speakers' platform at Free Deny Corner, in front of the Guildhall, and crowds were streaming into the square. Before the bulk of the marchers could reach the meeting, they were stopped by army barricades and diverted back toward the Bogside. People didn't like this, naturally enough, but they didn't resist. Twenty or 30 young men were the only ones to make any trouble; they taunted the army and threw some rocks. But that's standard behavior these days and there was no other violence from the crowd, no guns, no petrol bombs, nothing.

Then, without warning, British paratroops charged out and began firing wildly at the crowd--spraying bullets everywhere. They kept on firing for the next 20 minutes. The scene became a nightmare. I had just begun to speak when the shooting broke out. At first, none of us on the speakers' platform realized what was happening. Then we hit the deck. And the shooting went on, with a kind of thump! thump! thump! noise. When I looked up, a minute or so later, the whole square was empty, except for a few bodies sprawled in the distance. Thousands of people had just hit the ground simultaneously and then crawled away. Those who hadn't been shot, that is. After the shooting stopped, I got to my feet and went around the corner. More dead and wounded were there. I felt no horror, no fear, not even anger. Just a cold realistic assessment that they had murdered a lot of us.

As I walked through the streets, I found I knew many of the dead. One young girl had seen soldiers jump out of their armored cars to fire indiscriminately into the crowd. A 17-year-old boy next to her was shot in the stomach; he died with his head in her lap. She went into shock, but a man named Barney McGuigan led her away to safety. As the firing kept on, the two of them heard somebody nearby screaming: "I don't want to die. I don't want to die." McGuigan told the girl he'd have to find that man and help him. She urged him not to, but he said, "No, I must help. Don't worry, I'll wave a white handkerchief. The soldiers wouldn't shoot at a white handkerchief." He walked slowly out to the dying man, waving his handkerchief. As he reached his side, they shot him through the head. All the survivors have stories like that to tell.

When the list was complete, 13 men, half of them in their teens, were dead and another 27 wounded, men and women alike. We just sat there through the night, calling relatives in other parts of the country and saying, "I'm sorry, there's no other way to say this, but your son has just been shot by the British army." When it was all over, we just sat in the corner and cried, and then got drunk. The British army must be very proud of its work that day.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do after Bloody Sunday?

[A] Devlin: I flew to London next morning for an emergency debate in Parliament. I was still in a state of shock. And there were all those well-fed hypocrites, already saying that the British army fired in "self-defense" and that all those killed were I. R. A. terrorists. I was sick with rage when I heard that. Not one of those people had a gun or a bomb or any kind of weapon. Most of them had been shot in the back. Their corpses weren't even cold yet and the government was already trying to blacken their names by shifting the responsibility for their deaths. Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, was the worst of the lot. He just stood there in Parliament, smugly promising to appoint another one of England's notorious impartial investigations.

I tried to speak, but the Speaker denied me permission. "I was there," I shouted. "Let me talk." The Conservative benches shouted, "Shut up!" and Maudling went on with his lies. Well, that was it. I saw red. "You're a murdering hypocrite," I screamed at Maudling. I ran across the chamber, grabbed him by the hair with my left hand and punched him in the face over and over again with my right. Ted Heath, brave man that he is, was right next to him, terrified, white as a sheet. He started crawling up the bench away from us. Maudling just stood there, stunned, while I punched him, his fat mouth hanging open in shock. And then the chief whip, Francis Pym, staggered over and gallantly tried to protect Mr. Maudling. He was too (concluded on page 223)Playboy Interview(continued from page 90) much of a gentleman to hit me, so he just got tangled up between us. His breath alone was strong enough to win the battle. Suddenly, the whole thing was so farcical that my anger just drained away. Bob Melish, the Labor whip, intervened at that point. He was trying to look outraged but couldn't help laughing. "Bernadette," he said, "that's quite enough." I'm proud to say that was the first time in history a lady ever assaulted a cabinet minister during a session of Parliament. It may not be the last time.

[Q] Playboy: Would you do it again?

[A] Devlin: If necessary. I'm sorry I didn't strangle him when I had the chance. Actually, that whole incident shows a lot about England: There was more popular outrage over my punching up a cabinet member than over 13 innocent people murdered by the British army. Of course, Irish life has always come cheap to England. At least now they've learned they have to pay for it with their own.

[Q] Playboy: Can you see no grounds for reconciliation with England? Or will your bitterness, violence and misery be handed down to the next generation?

[A] Devlin: There's a solution to any human problem. In this case, I can actually see two solutions, short term and long term. For the short term, hostilities could cease tomorrow if the British would unconditionally release all internees and other political prisoners, declare an amnesty for all those currently charged with crimes against the state and withdraw all troops to their barracks with a specified date for total withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

Stormont and the whole Unionist state apparatus would have to be permanently dismantled, not just temporarily suspended as it is now, under Westminster's direct rule. All parties in Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, conservative and revolutionary, could then get together to determine conditions for the peaceful reunification of their country and the protection of minority rights. That would be a short-term solution for the immediate suffering and bloodshed. It's far from perfect and it might not work at all, given our hardened sectarian attitudes.

[Q] Playboy: If the British were to move out tomorrow, what would be the danger of a Protestant backlash?

[A] Devlin: It's highly probable. I believe in times of crisis there are two ways to go--left and right--and the Protestants would probably go right. If they fight, we'll have to defend ourselves. But I don't believe that violence from any quarter is going to radicalize the Protestants; they've got to be radicalized on the class issues. So, for that matter, have the Catholics.

[Q] Playboy: But would an independent Ireland be economically viable?

[A] Devlin: Yes, but only on socialist lines. For example, if we nationalized the mines, we would release £80,000,000 in the next seven years. The British say we can't live without their money. The British taxpayers pour approximately £150,000,000 into Northern Ireland every year. But we export £700,000,000 of profit from Northern Ireland to Britain in the same period.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you lose those export markets if the relationship with England were severed?

[A] Devlin: Why would we? We make the produce and sell it; we could sell it anywhere. We've got stuff that can be eaten, can be worn, can be bought. It's a great myth that without capitalism nothing can be bought or sold. Henry Ford personally doesn't have a clue how to build motorcars, how to sell them, how to repair them. But he's got all the money because his grandfather invented the motorcar. By accident of birth, Henry Ford continues to live on the work of other people. Everything England made and every penny she has taken out of this country, she made out of us. She stole the wealth beneath the ground, she stole the wealth above it, she stole the wealth of our labor. And she came here to do just that. If we keep all we have, we'll survive. There's no doubt about that.

So you see, the ultimate long-range solution for Ireland, which I realize won't come about overnight, is independent socialism. Until we have a society in which we solve our own economic and social problems and control our own destiny, the present problems of exploitation and injustice will remain. That's why I'm a committed socialist and why more and more of our people are turning toward socialism as the only viable alternative. We can't have true freedom without social justice; and in Ireland, we can't have either without socialism. It won't come today, tomorrow or the day after. But it will come. It has to come.

[Q] Playboy: In the light of all this hatred and bloodshed, are you really optimistic about the future of Ireland?

[A] Devlin: Yes, I am. We've been fighting 800 years to bring a just system to this country, and for 800 years they've jailed us. Today our spirit is stronger than ever. I'm still here, and thousands of kids are growing up just like me. I've brought a child of my own into this world, and I'm convinced she'll live to see the society we're trying to build. If not, her children will. If you dream a dream long enough, it becomes reality. Our dream is coming. Nothing can stop it.