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Civil Rights campaigner Devlin recalls McManus’ ‘good punch’ in Commons Posted: 7:31 pm April 7, 2021 By Zoe Tunney BERNADETTE Devlin McAliskey, the firebrand anti-establishment politician and Civil Rights campaigner, has spoken of how Lisnaskea solicitor and former Westminster MP, Frank McManus, “bounded” down from the back benches to defend her during an altercation in the British Houses of Parliament. Ms Devlin McAliskey was in interview with UTV’s Eamonn Mallie for his popular Face to Face series last week, and was asked about all manner of issues surrounding her poli...

“I knew when I was doing it, 'I don’t care about your Queen'.” The Coalisland woman was later shot and wounded along with her husband Michael in a UDA murder bid at their home on the shores of Lough Neagh in 1981. Speaking about their survival, Mrs McAliskey said: “They left us for dead. I should have died. They left our house without a shot unfired.” But away from the cameras a remarkable bond developed between herself and the former DUP leader and First Minister. When the then Miss Devlin became active in civil rights protests during her tenure in Queen’s University, she unilate...

Stanley Newens at the Labour Party conference in Brighton in 1991 Credit: David Fowler/Alamy Stanley Newens, who has died aged 91, was a standard-bearer for Labour’s old Left during 15 years in the Commons, and as long in the European Parliament. An East Ender whose route to Westminster took in working down the pit and teaching history, he stuck with the same constituency despite losing it twice. Yet an uninterrupted tenure might not have brought him office, given his record of rebellion against the defence, foreign and economic policies of Harold Wilson’s first government. A passionate c...

Warm tributes have been paid to veteran civil rights leader Eamonn McCann, who is resigning as a Derry City and Strabane councillor on health grounds.

Black clouds have beset thy birth, And your people die like morning stars, That your light may grace the earth. – “Stars of Freedom,” 1981 H-Block, Long Kesh Prison Camp ℘℘℘ Watching Bobby Sands die in 1981, much of the world realized, finally, that the young IRA soldier and hunger striker was a freedom fighter, and the view of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland forever changed. It was no longer seen as two Irish factions fighting over who had the better Jesus, but rather a struggle for human rights. Sands’ death was another chapter in Ireland’s long history of marty...