'After the deaths of four prisoners, she said, 'We have to ask ourselves, did we do it wrong? Was vul oil diley wrong? Were our tactics wrong!
'After so many deaths, if feelings are high in Dublin, you can imagine what they are like in ine norin. lt is understanade dar come vee voy did, didn't work. should do something eise.
'But first we have to ask ourselves: Was were doing wrong? I don't think it was. We tried to save the lives oi le, prisoners Dy Dutlaing a singie issue campaign.
She asked the crowd: 'was this the wrong thing to do?' She was, answered with shouts of Bias Then she said, 'We have to ask ourselves why we failed to save the lives of the hunger strikers. ' She described the bias of the Dublin media which opposed the Struggie of the opCatholic population under the pretext of a need to be 'fair' to the Protestants.
'You get daily doses Harold McClusker (a Loyalist MP) and you'd think there's be being killed north but in his constituency, and that Loyalists never killed anybody.
Bernadette continued: Our problem is that we had to build a mass. movement and give it pontical muscic and a culung edge in the time it took men to Bernadette spoke | need to 'Drive a wedge between Mrs Thatcher and the SDLP' The rioting that had developed after the death of the hunger strikers, although it inturiated people, did not help widen this wedge It had the opposite effect, she argued, increasing the gap between ine M Block ment and those sections of the population was trying reach. 'Those people They don't know why you are throwing a rock don't think that any usefui purpose is served by calling the rioters hooligans in disguise. I think that these peobreak windows they are angry, because they see can't think anything else to do, and then they think, well, they aren't our windows anyway. I know the 'I felt the same before Francis Hughes' death. I was walkof ing around banging my head on the wall thinking a second prisoner the going die and nothing we can do about it.
'There is something we have to accept - and one of hardest - inal we nave lost four prisoners and we can't bring them back.