Ahem. Never Mind Patrick. When Is St. Bernadette's Day?

Miss Bernadette Devlin, M.P., breaking pavement flagstones during August 1969, riots in Derry.

Bernadette [Devlin McAliskey] found out when she visited the U.S. in the early 1970s that:

"I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. 'My people' — the people who know about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be 'my people', the Irish Americans who know about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil-rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York, I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honour not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers."

Hear Ms. McAliskey reading the writing of Mumia Abu-Jamal here:

"What to a Prisoner is the Fourth of July"


A mural featuring Bernadette in the Bogside, Derry, Ireland.

Wikipedia also has more on Bernadette Devlin McAliskey who in the pantheon of Irish s/heroes can easily take her place alongside Queen Maeve, Grainne Ni Maille, and Constance Markievicz.