Bernadette Devlin Quotes

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament: it is to get something done.

... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.

We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else

Irish Catholics are more interested in the rosary beads than in the rosary.

It wasn't long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.

Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I've allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.

Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence.

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents-if the term is to be used at all.

I'm not good enough to be a saint and not bad enough to be interesting.

I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.

Free love is too expensive.

One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do!

I think my life will always be worth living, though I don't imagine it being very easy.

I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.

The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.

But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.