Now showing
The Irish Problem (1972-03-25)
About this film
Miss Devlin had earned the reputation of a young firebrand (still only 24, she had already served in Parliament for three years; recently she had physically attacked the Home Secretary on the floor of the House of Commons; visiting New York a year or so earlier, she handed over to the Black Panthers the key to the city that Mayor Lindsay had given her). She demonstrates here that her discontents are not precisely those of most of her Irish Catholic constituents: WFB: "You've had more experience than any country in the history of the world with democratic government, and the fact that you still..." BD: "You'd think by now we'd know it doesn't work." WFB: "...have an imperfect system suggests one of two things: one is that..." BD: "I do suggest one thing: that we scrap the whole system and try another one. This one evidently doesn't work." WFB: "Yeah, that's your suggestion. There are, I suppose, about 50 million people who disagree with you, and unless you want to suspend the democratic process, we are going to have to wait for them..." BD: "We've never had a plebiscite on it."
Directors & creators
Southern Educational Communications Association
Subjects
public broadcasting, AAPB, Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., Politics and government, Northern Ireland, McAliskey, Bernadette Devlin, 1947-
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