Hello. In this programme, I'm talking face to face with one of the best known activists and former politicians of the past five decades about her formative influences and experiences.

As Bernadette Devlin, she came to prominence at the age of 21 when she was elected to Westminster as the MP for Mid Ulster in 1969.

And she's rarely been far from the headlines since.

Bernadette McCalloskey, welcome to Red Lines.

Thank you very much.

Cast your mind back for me to your youth in the 1950s and 60s.

Was there a moment you can identify as the one where you realized you were interested in politics?

No.

I think I had no interest in politics until politics came to me.

I was at the university and the university was very politically active

from the year I went down,

but I was not even active in politics

until my last year, fourth year, in my degree.

So there was nothing conscious in my youth

about politics.

It made me say, oh yes, that's, you know, I want to change the world.

But you learn as an adult when you reflect on your childhood

that all of the influences that steered me to the

point where when the civil rights buses I put it crossed my path I got on it without a moment's

thought the influences that led me to that point were led in my childhood.

And you went to Queens, as you say, and that was where something happened at what,

a switch was flicked, a light bulb went on. It was the late 1960s, the civil rights movement

...