“I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m also oppressed as an Irish person. Everyone in this country is oppressed and yet we can only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole. But, I don’t think that alone is enough. This isn’t the first time that women have been seen as secondary, but women today have been through so much that they won’t just let things be. I hope I’m still alive when the British are driven out. Then the struggle begins anew.”
– Commandante Mairead Farrell
“I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. ‘My people’ – the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce – were not Irish Americans. They were Black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who knew 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 honor not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.”
― Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
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