> **Note on this transcript.** The automatic captions fail badly on this recording — a strong Tyrone accent, an audience that laughs and applauds over her, and long passages the machine renders as word salad. Perhaps a quarter of the talk cannot be recovered from the captions alone. What is below repairs the argument, the names, the quotations and the dates, all of which are secure; everything else is marked `[inaudible]` rather than guessed at. **This talk deserves a proper transcription from the audio.** Do not quote from it without listening first.
*Bernadette McAliskey, speaking in London in the run-up to the centenary of the Easter Rising, on the same platform as Geoff Bell and Ken Loach. She opens by urging the audience to read Geoff's book — Bell published Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement in 2016 — and she is speaking five days after the Irish general election of 26 February 2016, which left neither of the two civil war parties able to govern alone.*
00:04 Bernadette McAliskey: [The] first of all is to urge you: do make sure that you read Geoff's book. And there are a couple of other books [that] have been published, and you should make
00:36 sure you read them. And the reason that I say that is that if you're old enough and you've been active enough, you have an understanding based on your own experience — which many people in this room do — of struggle, and of history past. [inaudible]
01:06 [inaudible] because it is important that we read in[to] the history.
01:39 It is important that when people and authors like Geoff [recover] our history for us, from the places in which it has been lost, that we reclaim it [and] retell it to the next generations — not simply because it would be the decent thing to do, but because within it is the
02:11 understanding of the battles of the future. And also I would suggest, if you haven't read it — it's a very small book — that you should also read a book called *A Star Called Henry*. Has anybody else read that? You should really [read] *A Star Called Henry*, by Roddy Doyle, because it also gives you the smaller person's view of the big things in the world.
02:44 And that's very important, because the [whole] history of 1916 is in the telling of small stories. And the depth to which — never mind [the] British Labour movement — the depths to which the founders and controllers of the sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland,
03:17 buried and [hid] and distorted the history of 1916 verges on criminal. [inaudible] was formed,
03:48 you can rest assured that nothing in the vision of 1916 was about [creating] a neo-colonial state that would do the British work for them. [inaudible]
04:21 And there's that feeling in Ireland which — because it is unpunished business [?] — makes the [Rising] difficult, not just for those who would distance themselves from it and try and create a disconnect between the vision and the courage and the determination and the need for revolution in 1916,
04:52 and those who betrayed [it] — not only for those who are trying to [hide], but for those who suffered the pain and the loss. And 100 years later [they] asked: for what died the sons and daughters [of Erin] [?]. [inaudible]
05:24 The words — [she quotes the first verse of "The Red Flag": *the people's flag is deepest red*] — those words were written by an Irishman, and arguably only an Irishman could have written those words with such passion into a labour anthem. In fact he wanted [them] to be sung
05:55 to the air of the Irish "White Cockade". The British didn't like that, so they picked a German tune, and — there's a whole other story. But notwithstanding that contradiction of ideas and emotion that is played out [?] today as a living reality in Ireland, [I'm] reminded of something on the other side of that argument. That
06:27 [inaudible] "a pretty good man and woman died for you", [or] what[ever] — an old woman said to me in 1997. [She was] 90 years [old], and she [had] lost three [relations] [?] in the war, the Troubles, political conflict, whatever you want to call it — but for us, in the struggle against British [imperialism] and the [inaudible] of the terrorism,
06:58 racism, that went on between 1968 [and] 1998 and which still continues. "No," Mrs [inaudible] said, "it doesn't matter where we are, or how we ended up. But it was right, and it was necessary, and it was not wrong [?] that we fought as we did from '68 on."
07:30 The same is true of the Rising. It was right, it was necessary, and it was not wrong [?]. No armchair revisionists figuring out that they would [have] been on their way to a democratic state much easier only for it, [that] they were doing that anyway and there was no need for it —
08:00 no need for any of that. So it is important, as I say, to go back and find the stories. And they're in their own families — those of you from Irish extraction, [in] your own families. And I discovered, quite recently, [at the] 100th anniversary — nobody lived in [inaudible] now, you [knew] very well, [just stay at night] [inaudible] Mrs
08:30 [McSorley] [?] was a widow woman who minded her own business and did her shopping, and [had] no opinions [on] anything. [She] was a pleasant lady, and [inaudible], and took no part [in] nothing, your honour. But there were very few people who knew [that] Mrs [McSorley] kept what was known as a safe house [?]. And in fact she had the safest house
09:01 of all. [It] was not [inaudible]; nobody would [think] as much [of] life as a [inaudible], and only very few people [knew]. [inaudible] when the peace came [inaudible] the great urge [in] the peace for the people to tell the business [inaudible]
09:32 [inaudible] people would say, oh yeah, yeah, [inaudible] and she kept a [safe house], that would be a house in which people who were wanted by the police would actually be safe. They [could] come and no one [would] know they were there, and the police wouldn't suspect that house because — police! [inaudible] [Laughter]
10:04 They're supposed to have intelligence, and they use this intelligence [to] roam [around] annoying people, and then they come round and, you know, nab you by the collar and [inaudible]. If you've done anything, they say what we think you have, because we have intelligence, police intelligence has informed us where people were. Police intelligence didn't actually work, because police intelligence is based on stereotyping, prejudice and politics. They pre-define people who look like [they]
10:37 might be bad for society. They're invariably young, almost predominantly male, they belong to minority politics, usually on the left, and minority religions, usually not Christian. At the minute, police intelligence is almost entirely focused on young men who are Muslims, read [the] papers, talk to lefties and go to church [?]. And if they've got any relatives outside
11:08 of [inaudible], police intelligence has all their numbers and you're in trouble. So police intelligence never caught up with Mrs [McSorley]. But people used to say, yeah, [how is it] this [one] kept a safe house? It turns out that Mrs [McSorley] was previously Alice [inaudible],
11:38 and [inaudible] his father was born [inaudible], and then Alice [inaudible] was a member of Cumann na mBan at the early age of 16. And obviously, because things didn't go [as hoped], [the] country was partitioned, [inaudible] came from opinions to herself. But [when] the [time] came round she did what she could, and kept a safe house. So when I discovered this I went to look —
12:10 [inaudible] I went to look up the old papers, which were 50 years old, and it was interviews that were done in 1966 that had been unearthed. And when I'm reading [it] now it says Alice [inaudible] of Cookstown was a very young member of Cumann na mBan, and was under the influence — as the police intelligence [would say], was under the influence of two older women, one of whom was Mrs Johnny Devlin.
12:43 That's my [granny]. [Music] The day my granny died I never knew that [there] was [a] republican political thought in her head. And if you think of that older generation [of] people, many of whom
13:16 [inaudible] particularly in the northern [part], the crushing defeat of that vision, and the impact on them and on their lives of being identified as people who had been a part of it — not only a repressive state with police intelligence watching them, but a whole generation of anybody closed up and said no,
13:48 until 1968. And their grandchildren — not their children, but their grandchildren — begin to take up the issue again. And it goes back again [to] what Geoff says: it's not poets who make revolutions, [it's] not artists who make revolutions, it's not revolting students all on their own [who] make revolutions. It is the objective social, economic
14:20 environment in which people are forced to live, combined with the vision of artists and poets and visionaries, that make[s] revolution. And I'm not being [cheeky] [?] — I keep asking, where is the English revolution?
14:53 [Laughter] Are you short of visionaries? Are you short [of] poets, historians, young people? Why do you [not] look at Mr Cameron?
15:24 Look at what is happening. Look at the dismantling in this country of 100 years of social progress. That's what's happening, and it matters to us in Ireland because we're still tied to you in many ways. A National Health Service — [they're] destroying it.
15:56 Trade unionism — [inaudible] leaders [have] something to answer for as well, because they become collaborat[ors] in the management as opposed to the leadership of the opposition. Look what's happening to social and public housing. Look [what's] going to happen to working-class families, driven out —
16:28 [inaudible] push them all out and hope that [inaudible] somewhere [inaudible] the rest of us [inaudible]. But let's push working people, let's [make] some point of everything. Look at the commodification of water. There's a big thing in Ireland, and it's interesting — and in this [country] that's the
17:00 biggest thing, probably because on an island where it never stops raining — well, there was a core understanding of what is happening: that the provision of water, which is a basis of life, is a public service; the provision of [clean] water is a public, government duty.
17:33 Water is not a commodity to be bought or sold in the private market. And the fact that we have come down to the commodification of water — you know, that's simply beyond. [inaudible] is a commodification of [inaudible] children and older people [inaudible]
18:04 so we may really be used as door stoppers. Okay? I don't know — if we run out of horses, maybe we'd all be sent to the glue factory. I don't know. But if we're commodifying everything, [the] next thing — and taking that circle back — is a commodification of human beings. And we all [need] to see that. Let me tell you,
18:35 we don't [have to] look too far. I'm [talking] about old people, which doesn't [include] other people that are older than me. But if we look, we are seeing the commodification of people who are not from here. The people who are not from here are commodities. Economic migrants are commodities. Refugees are — asylum seekers, immigrants are commodities.
19:08 People not born on this island, [or] in the second generation, [and] disabled [people], even in Ireland as well and across Europe, [are] required to justify their existence [by] the economic wealth they create for other people. So people coming to make a life in this country have to argue that they should be [allowed in] because
19:39 they may bring [inaudible]. That's commodification. So when you start to look at it like that, never mind in 1916 — in 2016 people would want to be getting [out from] under the United Kingdom. I think the Scots do. I think the Welsh, very quietly, certainly. I think
20:10 [inaudible] the next election. We'll see if — what do they call it, Northern Ireland, the [Greater or No More] [inaudible] — but [we'll] see if the [people] in Northern Ireland do, and then [certainly] I [think] the people of England do, [because] the [first] imperialist stronghold of England is actually not just Ireland but also Scotland and Wales. That's why I'm glad
20:40 to hear that you're in favour, because I'm not by myself. [inaudible] I'm not really an admirer of some of the things about Europe, but [inaudible] every time [I] see an opportunity [inaudible]
21:17 [Music] being in favour, and voting in favour of staying in the EU, is one of the best things people certainly in Scotland, England and Wales can do, because of what [it] may [do] for Cameron. If the greater population of England wants out and [the rest of] us want to stay in, we have a new [situation] — we'll have [another] referendum [inaudible]
21:49 [Applause] So what I'm really trying to say is: if you want to commemorate 1916 — [inaudible] the British government took the leaders out and executed them, and no doubt somewhere down the line we [will] get another sick [inaudible] apology out of somebody at Stormont, [or] somebody in Westminster sen[ding] [it] on behalf of
22:21 — [that] if they offended anyway by murdering people, well, we'll apologise. And I'd like to say [to] that: [why not] try apologising for the rape of Africa, the plunder of India, the stealing of the wealth and the silver mines of South America? British imperialism has a lot of apologies [to make].
22:52 Don't be apologising to me, I don't care for apologies. And it's not about commemorating 1916 simply and saying it was brilliant [inaudible] or it was right. What [we need] to remember at the end of the day [is] what it was about. And it wasn't perfect, [nor] in those days was [there] any difference between a republican and a
23:22 [inaudible]. [inaudible] is to go to the core of it, and know what it was about. It was when the objective circumstances of ordinary working-class, small people were such that they could not be humanely expected
23:56 to continue to live like that without protest, without objection and without [resistance], that the people themselves threw up — albeit a minority — [a group] of brilliant men and women who stood [in] the line and raised the flag, and [lived] strong, and [gave] that inspiration and vision to people everywhere.
24:27 To say: you have nothing to fear but your fears [?], you have nothing to lose but your chains [?], and you have everything to [gain] — which is your fundamental rights, your [inaudible], food on your table, the right to determine your own existence, [as] human beings individually and
24:59 collectively. That's what it was about. It was about standing up and taking that struggle and taking that fight to the oppressor, and being willing to risk all that you had for that which is worth all. And it begs the question — and [it] begs the question [of] us, [as] people do it in smaller ways now, as [the] homeless gather on the street,
25:31 as the people protest [library] closure[s], as young Muslims demand solidarity against their victimisation in this country. They [ask] one simple question, and it still has one simple answer: whose side are you on? It's not comfortable, it's not complex, and yes it's full of contradictions
26:03 and struggle. But at the end of the day there are only two sides to be on: the side of justice or the side of injustice, the side of the poor or the side of the rich, the side of the oppressed or the side of the oppressor. [inaudible] And when I was very young
26:35 and impatient and headstrong and not very [tactful] [?], I used to think [that] the people who are in the middle either needed to get behind us or get out of the way, or we were just [going to] ride over them. And [since] then [I've] come over [inaudible] and have learned a lot. I think that's still the best cause. [inaudible]
27:13 [inaudible] the other question in me [inaudible] really enjoys — I really enjoy seeing how the existence of a mild-mannered, left-of-centre, social democratic, middle-of-the-road — not all that left of centre, but he
27:44 works that way — [Applause] that means they're running scared. Yes. So let's be real: let's support Jeremy, [keep] pushing him on. [Applause] He [will]
28:15 either go on and on and on, or in the last analysis we go up and off. But let's get behind that and push a progressive Labour Party on. We've seen [inaudible] independent socialists [inaudible] see changes in the South, but not great. And yes —
28:47 one of the biggest parties — neither [Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael] [?], neither of them have enough support to effectively lead a government unless the two civil war parties get into government together. [inaudible] 100 years isn't long enough to [inaudible].
29:19 [Fianna Fáil] would lose the people [it] just got back if it went into [a] coalition [with Fine Gael] [?]. And that's how deep it goes. That's how deep it goes. [inaudible]
29:50 [inaudible] These are interesting times. So let's not just [talk] about [1916] when we talk about [it] — let's get prepared [?]. Although it doesn't look like it, [inaudible] British imperialism was never, in a hundred years, as vulnerable as it is today.
30:24 [Applause]
## Corrections
- "make sure that you read **Jeff's hookah**" → "read **Geoff's book**" — Geoff Bell, who shares the platform; he published *Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement* in 2016. - "a book called **a star called Henry** ... you should really start on Henry by **Rolling darling**" → ***A Star Called Henry*** by **Roddy Doyle**. - "a member of **common man** at the early age of 16" and "a very young member of **common amount**" → "**Cumann na mBan**", the women's republican organisation. The captions make it unfindable. - "one of whom was Mrs **John Van Devlin** that's my **brother**" → "Mrs **Johnny Devlin** — that's my **granny**", which the next sentence confirms ("the day my granny died"). Devlin is McAliskey's own maiden name, and the point of the story is that she only discovered her grandmother's politics from a 1966 interview. - "**Alice family of Cookstown**" → Alice, of Cookstown, County Tyrone; the surname is rendered four different ways by the captions ("Mrs Mitchell", "Mrs mcsorry", "Mrs mcslide", "Mrs Smith's life", "as much light") and is given here as [McSorley] with a query, because none of the variants is reliable. - "it's not **ports** who make revolutions, not **art us** to make revolutions, it's not **revoking students**" → "it's not **poets** ... not **artists** ... not **revolting students**". This is the thesis of the whole talk, and the captions destroy all three terms. - "are you short of **missionaries**, are you short **quotes**, historians" → "short of **visionaries** ... short [of] **poets**". - "look at Mr **camera**" → "Mr **Cameron**"; "the dismantling in this **company**" → "in this **country**". - "on an island [where] it never stops **green**" → "never stops **raining**". - "maybe we'd all be sent to the **gluten Factory**" → "the **glue factory**". - "refugees are **say no Seekers**" → "**asylum seekers**". - "there are only two **signs** to be on, the **sight** of Justice ... the **sight** of the **oppressant**" → "two **sides** ... the **side** of justice ... the side of the **oppressor**". - "that means they're **rolling scared**" → "they're **running scared**"; "push a progressive **laboratory** on" → "a progressive **Labour Party**"; "a **mighty mannered** left of center" → "**mild-mannered**"; "not all that **laughter Center**" → "not all that **left of centre**". "Jeremy" is Jeremy Corbyn, six months into his leadership. - "the **real** of Africa" → "the **rape** of Africa"; "**British appearance** was a lot of apologies for" → "**British imperialism** has a lot of apologies [to make]"; "British **apparentism**" in the closing line → "British **imperialism**". - "**fear of oil** would lose the people [it] just got back if it went into the **corrosion**" → "**Fianna Fáil** ... if it went into [a] **coalition**". The Irish general election of 26 February 2016 had left Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil — "the two civil war parties" — unable to govern separately, which is the situation she is describing. - "minority religions usually not **Crystal**" → "usually not **Christian**"; "almost predominantly **real**" → "predominantly **male**"; "**NAB** you by the **color**" → "**nab** you by the **collar**". - "these are **interested in** times" → "these are **interesting** times"; "let's get **unpaired**" → "let's get **prepared** [?]". - "**all be at** the minority of brilliant men and women who **stood the lane**" → "**albeit** a minority ... who **stood [in] the line**"; "worth **Allah**" → "worth **all**". - "victimization in this **contract**" → "in this **country**". - **Two quotations are identified rather than reconstructed.** At 05:24 she recites the first verse of **"The Red Flag"**, written by the Irishman **Jim Connell**; the captions garble every line of it, and the words are not reproduced here because what she actually said cannot be recovered from them. At 04:52 she alludes to **"For What Died the Sons of Róisín"**. The story she then tells is true and worth keeping: Connell wanted his words sung to the air of the Jacobite "White Cockade", and the labour movement adopted the German tune of "O Tannenbaum" instead. - Her two triads are marked where the third term is lost: "it was right, and it was necessary, and it was **not wrong [?]**", said twice — once of the 1968–98 conflict, in the words of the 90-year-old woman she met in 1997, and once of the Rising. - Further marked readings: "because it is **unpunished business [?]**"; "for what died the sons and daughters **[of Erin] [?]**"; "she [had] lost three **[relations] [?]**"; "I'm not being **[cheeky] [?]**"; "go to **church [?]**", where the sentence is about young Muslims and "mosque" would be expected; "not very **[tactful] [?]**"; "nothing to fear but your **fears [?]**, nothing to lose but your **chains [?]**"; "played out **[?]** today as a living reality".