Dealing with Devlin
FOR more than 50 years Lelia Doolan has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career at the coalface of Irish cultural life. Most notably, perhaps, she was a pivotal member of a group of young, innovative, and socially conscious broadcasters who nurtured RTÉ in its tender years in the mid 1960s. Among other things, Doolan produced the celebrated current affairs programme 7 Days and the provocative soap opera The Riordans. In 1969, however, she departed RTÉ with Bob Quinn and Jack Dowling in protest at the station’s growing bureaucracy and cultural conservatism.
In later years, Doolan served as artistic director of the Abbey Theatre and as chair of the Irish Film Board. She has also been a film producer, a lecturer, and was one of the founders of the Galway Film Fleadh.
It was at the Fleadh last summer that Doolan premiered her latest work, a gripping documentary on Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. A decade in the making, Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey has won plaudits for its intimate portrait of one of the most intriguing figures in the North’s fraught history. Commissioned by TG4, it will be broadcast by the station on January 30, the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. It screens at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork from January 15-18.
The film is remarkable for its great welter of historical footage. Edited together with wonderful clarity and rhythm, it creates a profound sense of what was at stake in the North during the Troubles.
“I think the intensity of that time and the day-to-day horror of it all is something that people in the South ought perhaps to think about a little bit more,” says Doolan.
Of course, it was this everyday intensity that necessitated the intervention of a figure as similarly intense as Devlin McAliskey.
Devlin was only 21 when she was elected an MP for mid-Ulster in 1969. The following year she was jailed for four months for her part in the Battle of the Bogside, the intense few days of fighting between Derry residents and the RUC-. In an era of revolutionary fervour throughout the world, her rise among the nationalist community was met with alarm by the political establishment. A staunch socialist and republican, she was decried as a “mini-skirted Castro” by her political enemies. In 1981, in the midst of her support of the hunger strikers on H-Block, Devlin McAliskey survived being struck by seven bullets when loyalist paramilitaries attacked her home. A gradual drift from the centre of politics in the North followed.
Devlin McAliskey’s political biography is a tantalising one and the film recalls it in riveting fashion. But Doolan’s real achievement is in capturing the trajectory of an activist’s life. In this regard, the documentary’s title is instructive — this is a film about a journey. It depicts a woman now in her 60s weighing up a life led in accordance with a set of ideological convictions.
Notably, the film provides no carousel of expert talking heads to punctuate or counter Devlin McAliskey’s commentary. Some might perceive this as an editorial imbalance, but it certainly allows the subject’s own perceptions to come through with more clarity.
“It’s Bernadette’s story,” says Doolan. “So it’s her story to tell. I was never really interested in a lot of people’s opinions about her. If we were to do something that enabled her to say something coherent about her own way of thinking, we didn’t need other people intervening.”
Certainly, it’s a film that is sympathetic to its subject and, in conversation too, Doolan is full of admiration for Devlin McAliskey. “She has a very ironic, self-deprecating sense of humour, which is always very appealing and made it easy to shape the film. She says at one point: ‘A little CS gas was neither here nor there; I was smoking 30 cigarettes a day’.” Principally, however, Doolan the film documents Devlin McAliskey’s “underlying and continuing impetus for social justice and some kind of egalitarian society,” says Doolan.
Doolan, too, has been an activist in her time. One of the implicit questions the film poses is whether the sort of social activism we associate with the late 1960s is still possible today.
“It may have gone into the shadows for a while, but I think it’s there,” says Doolan. “I think in every generation there are people who will stand up for ideas and a philosophy of living, people who will act for change. I wanted to remind people what one small, tiny person can do, and is doing. In that sense, it’s a teaching aid, and I’m hoping that students and schoolchildren and people who study history and politics might get a chance to look at it and see how it falls into the realm of encouraging people to be citizens.
“If you look at the Occupy movement, even though they may not be terribly intellectually coherent at the moment, they’re saying ‘No’, which is, I think, a legitimate thing to say. They’re making that real with their own lives. If you look at the people who sat down in the squares of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and died for ideas that appear to be unclear, these are the kinds of things that were going on in 1968.”
Of course, it would be remiss not to ask Doolan about her thoughts on RTÉ as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. “My take on it is the same as it always was,” she says. “Given the model that was decided upon, which was always a contradictory model, it needed heroic, imaginative managerial abilities in order to create something really unusual and original. And that hasn’t been done.
“What has been done is some really interesting, imaginative and strong material in current affairs and politics. Of course, it has been biased sometimes. I would certainly say that some of the stuff on the North was. Some of the stuff relating to minority groups and protest groups still is. But I’d have a political point of view.
“And as an exile from the station for many years, I have to be careful when commenting about what’s going on there now.”
* Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey screens at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork from January 15-18. It will be broadcast on TG4 on January 30.
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