Bernadette Devlin Quotes

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

… 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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