DESTROYER OF A DREAM

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

DESTROYER OF A DREAM

Bernadette. By G. W. Target. Hodder and Stoughton. 384 pp. N.Z. price $10.45. One Wednesday morning in April, 1969, the British people woke to discover a new star had arisen in the House of Commons. On the day she took her seat, 21-year-old Bernadette Devlin had defied tradition to make a fighting speech in the Irish debate. Most of the commentators were enraptured. She was not only the youngest M.P., but also she had a fine, scornful turn of phrase, a youthful, fresh look about her, and a mini skirt. Those of course were the days when the English naively believed that solving the Northern Ireland problem was simply a matter of giving those likeable civil rights demonstrators the fair reforms they wanted . . . Today the English know better and Bernadette is no longer an M.P. There is a good book no doubt in this failure

of an opportunity, but Mr Target has not written it. Words pour out of him in a great slather of fine phrases, comment, and quotes from journalists. It is an achievement, perhaps, to manage a 384-page book on someone so young. Unfortunately, Mr Target leaves unanswered such questions as "What is she really like?” and “Were there ever moments when it occurred to her that just possibly Bernadette Devlin could be wrong about something?” For the truth about Bernadette may be that she is as much a prisoner of the past as the Ulster Unionists she helped to bring down. In the end she had no wider range of ideas, no more charitable view of the world, than the dinosaurs on the other side. Indeed, she may have done as much as anyone to destroy her own dream of a united, Socialist working class in Northern Ireland.