Family of Fighters Provides Another Symbol of Protest

LONDON — Roisin McAliskey is 25 years old, seven months pregnant and in jail. She may be Britain’s most contentious prisoner, and--being her mother’s daughter--she has become an incendiary symbol of Irish republican protest against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Deja vu.

It is nearly three decades since Bernadette Devlin catapulted her firebrand mixture of Irish nationalism and socialism from the angry, divided streets of Northern Ireland to international prominence. At 21, Devlin became the youngest woman ever elected to Parliament. She was a riveting speaker who entranced or infuriated listeners; a tousle-haired militant who once slapped a British minister as he addressed the Commons; an activist jailed for rioting.

Now, Bernadette McAliskey nee Devlin, who will be 50 next month, is campaigning for her eldest child’s release on bail. She says Roisin is innocent of terrorism charges but told one reporter that “I can think of more traumatic things than finding out that my daughter is a terrorist.”

When she was 9 years old, Roisin was in the family’s home with two younger children when Protestant terrorists shot her mother and stepfather. “The children never cried,” said Bernadette McAliskey, who was shot nine times.

In 1994, mother and daughter helped carry the coffin of Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, murdered founder of a radical splinter from the Irish Republican Army. Sean McCotter, Roisin’s partner and the father of her baby, served six years for an IRA bombing.

But Roisin McAliskey herself, an asthmatic who is described as a shy woman, had never been connected directly to IRA activism until a mortar attack last summer on a British army barracks in Osnabruck, Germany. Naming McAliskey as a suspect, German police asked for her extradition. She is being held without specific charge pending a British court decision on the request, possibly next month.

McAliskey’s internment under tough anti-terrorist legislation has made her a rallying point for nationalists as well as for lobbyists demanding better treatment for women prisoners in British jails.

Chris Tchaikovsky, of the rights group Women in Prison, said: “We can’t understand why Roisin McAliskey hasn’t been given bail. The government is willing to risk her and the baby and, God forbid, a conflagration in Northern Ireland--she is a symbol after all, Bernadette Devlin’s daughter--to keep her in jail.”

Passions run as high on the other side. When a constituent wrote to David Maclean, a member of Parliament, expressing concerns about the health of McAliskey, a heavy smoker, he replied: “When the day comes that the evil scum of the IRA are no longer murdering the innocent . . . then I am certain that . . . I shall be able to spare some [compassion] for the perpetrators.”

Prisoners fighting extradition sometimes are jailed for long periods in Britain pending final appeals. There is a time-tested regimen for high-risk terrorism suspects. But there is no precedent, McAliskey’s supporters say, for the detention of a pregnant IRA suspect.

McAliskey has said she may protest her detention by seeking a seat in Parliament.

British authorities recently transferred McAliskey from a high-security jail to Holloway Prison north of London, where there are facilities for pregnant women. Internal controls on McAliskey have been relaxed, allowing her to mix with other prisoners. She will be allowed to keep her baby in jail with her.

None of this satisfies supporters, who demand her release on bail. The British government, supported so far by the courts, says she is at risk of flight, noting that another IRA suspect wanted by German police fled to the Irish Republic, which has no extradition treaty with Germany.

With more court and street drama probable and the ever-present threat of new sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, before long there is likely to be a newborn symbol in the Irish nationalist struggle--like grandmother like mother like grandchild born in jail.