‘We are all in the one fight’ Bernadette McAliskey tells Bloody Sunday March attendees

Bernadette McAliskey said that acts of resistance, solidarity and kindness, big and small, were interconnected and when actioned here they impacted across the world.

"We are not alone,” she said, as she pointed out the repetitions the colonial narratives spun about people and people elsewhere in the world today.

“What happened to us was not unique; not something we did to bring punishment on ourselves because we were some kind of fighting people who don’t know how to live in peace. And that basically is the story that was told about this place: ‘It doesn’t have a solution’. And we hear that today about Palestine: There is no solution. We’re beginning to hear about it in the USA: There is no solution. And that the people don’t like each other: white people don’t like black people, Catholics don’t like Protestants; Protestants don’t like Catholic people, black people don’t like white people, nobody likes foreigners, nobody likes immigrants, nobody wants refugees. And yet when you come into the neighbourhoods of people who know who they are, you find compassion; you find solidarity. You find decent people who will go out of their way, people who will run the lengths and breadth of this country at the minute if they can think of nothing else to do. They are baking buns for Palestine. They are coming out, all of them, and eating their own buns in community halls and making cups of tea and paying the money to eat the buns they baked themselves and drink the tea they made themselves so that they can gather together in solidarity, drink tea, eat buns and raise money for Palestine.

"And people say we have no power. But such very very small things by people who don’t have a lot of confidence to do anything else have raised tens of thousands of pounds for Palestine. I look around here and see people who have raised money for mobile maternity clinics in Palestine. There are people in this city, who through contact with people like Hilda Orr, are feeding families, specific families. There are people who through Palestine Aid are doing much the same thing. Are we wealthy? Are we Elon Musk? No. But we know what needs to be done.

"Did we go to university and read books on it and get Master’s Degrees so we would know what was politically correct? No we didn’t.

"What we have in common with everybody is that for generation and generation and passed down to us in song and story and hurt and panic and trauma and small victories and big victories is an inter-generational knowledge through every fibre of our bones of what colonialism looks like, tastes like, feels like and what needs to be done with it.

"We need to overcome. And we are all engaged in that battle. And we are more aware now. I have ten year old, eight year old grandchildren who are aware that the world has gone crazy and that the adults in it need to stand up to the people who are destroying it. Children know that, we know that.

"We know that what happened here on Bloody Sunday happened because we challenged the injustice we were living in. The struggle here, the sound of marching feet, the mass movement, the armed struggle, the conveyor belt to prison, none of these things caused the problems here, they were the consequences of it. The IRA did not create the problems. The INLA did not create the problems. Even the UDA did not create the problems. They are all the consequence of a State that controls and governed by coercion and when the coercion doesn’t work, absolute naked unapologetic State violence. And their friends in the media lie about it and the politicians who are afraid of them acquiesce in it and blame us. No different than Palestine.”

Bernadette McAliskey said people the world over were up against the rising power of global fascism and everyone can play a part in that.

“We have to do what we can and not everybody can do the same thing but everybody has to act and everybody has to do something. And everybody’s bit has to be done on the basis that if we do not do something to help ourselves that in the process harms a struggle for the same thing.”

Back in the 60s, those gathered were told, the young people didn’t know the price they would pay.

“I didn’t know when I started within the Civil Rights movement that the day would come when I would stand here and watch people be killed in front of my eyes," Bernadette McAliskey said. “We didn’t know we would bury our dead. We didn’t know that young people would join armed organisations and risk their lives. We didn’t know we’d bury Hunger Strikers in jails for basic civilisation.”

She added however that the courage displayed by young people in this generation is inspirational “to those of us who may yet live long enough to see the end of British direct rule in any every part of this country”.

That day, she added, is coming. “We need to be saying to that lot in the south if you think for one minute after all we have been through we are coming down to this pit of complicity and cowardice in the face of fascism, you have another thing coming because we will build a new country with a new Constitution, with a new purpose, with a new determination; We will build a socialist republic for which our mothers and fathers, and grandfathers and grandmothers died. Ands the people of Palestine will build a socialist republic of Palestine. And I swear, though I will not live to see it, that there will be a socialist Republic in the United States of America.

"Not everybody sees that now but we are now in that battle, that battle that the 1% who own and control the world will own and control increasingly the governments of the world. They have already captured the democratic leadership of most of Europe who simply do the bidding of the 1%… we are pawns in their game unless we resist.”

"We are all in the one fight. The fight for the truth of Bloody Sunday is the fight for the truth of Palestine, the truth for the truth of America, the fight for the truth everywhere. The fight to save the planet itself is the fight for decolonisation.”