On This Day: Irish nationalist Bernadette Devlin, 21, is elected as Britain’s youngest female MP

APRIL 17, 1969: The 21-year-old Irish nationalist Bernadette Devlin was elected as Britain’s youngest female MP on this day in 1969.

The rebellious former student, who was expelled from university for leading civil rights protests, won a shock by-election victory in the Mid-Ulster constituency.

Standing as an independent, she defeated Anna Forrest, the widow of the previous Ulster Unionist Party MP George Forrest, after uniting Catholic voters to back her.

Devlin gained a 4,211 majority – wiping out her predecessor’s 2,560-vote advantage – thanks to 91.5% turnout, the highest in any fully democratic Westminster by-election.

Her victory, which came shortly before the beginning of a bloody 30-year period known as The Troubles, deeply shocked Protestants in the former loyalist stronghold.

She sympathised with the IRA and in a stirring House of Commons maiden speech – made on her 22nd birthday – she attacked the ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘bigoted’ UUP.

She said the only way to solve the growing unrest in Northern Ireland was to outlaw the party and end its ‘deliberate policy of dividing the people in order to keep the ruling minority in power’.

And she attacked the ruling Labour Party for failing to do so: ‘Any Socialist Government worth its guts would have got rid of them long ago,’ she stormed.

Devlin, a Catholic, also warned that sending British troops would not restore order to the increasingly troubled province.

‘I should not like to be either the mother or sister of an unfortunate soldier stationed there,’ she added forebodingly, four months before soldiers arrived in the province.

[On This Day: Britain’s first serving woman MP is elected]

She warned against totally abolishing the Stormont regime or imposing economic sanctions on the Northern Irish to spur them into introducing civil rights reforms.

She said a party which is ‘based on, and survives on, discrimination’ would never ‘sign its own death warrant’, adding: ‘I assure you, Mr Speaker, that one cannot impose economic sanctions on the dead.’

Devlin, who was inspired by Irish nationalist Constance Markievicz, the first woman to be elected to Westminster in 1918, devoted much of her speech to Londonderry.

Catholic residents in its Bog Side and Creggan districts had recently ousted the largely Protestant police from their self-declared autonomous area, ‘Free Derry’.

Devlin, who had led a student march there from Belfast, admitting building barricades there and described Royal Ulster Constabulary members as being like ‘wild Indians’.

She was jailed for nine months for inciting a riot following the Battle of the Bogside - when she joined the residents in a three-day clash with officers – in August 1969.

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A British Pathé newsreel filmed her delivering an impassioned speech to fellow nationalists.

Her time in the Commons was equally eventful.

She slapped Tory Home Secretary Reginald Maudling and accused him of lying about Bloody Sunday, when 14 protesters were killed by British troops in January 1972.

This second flashpoint event in Londonderry strongly turned nationalists against the presence of UK soldiers and massively boosted the recruitment of IRA members.

But, by then, Devlin had already lost much Catholic support following the birth of an illegitimate daughter, Roisin, in 1971.

In the 1974 General Election the newly-married MP lost her seat to Vanguard unionist John Dunlop after a rival nationalist stood and split the Catholic vote.

She never sought to regain her Westminster seat again but continued to support republican causes and twice failed to get elected to the Dublin Dail.

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In 1981, she and her husband, Michael McAliskey, survived an assassination attempt when loyalist gunmen burst into their house and shot them.

In 2003, in the aftermath of 9/11, she was denied entry into the U.S. due to her rioting conviction.

This was despite being granted an earlier visa to tour America in 1970 to help raise funds for the Provisional IRA.