Whatever happened to the SDLP?

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Whatever happened to the SDLP?

By Liam Kennedy

The only reason for insisting on the disarming and disbanding of paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland is to save David Trimble and liberal unionism. So runs the conventional wisdom. Really? There is no particular benefit in ending the reign of terror of the UDA�s former C company (�simply the best� but at what?) in the lower Shankill or of putting loyalist and republican racketeers out of business? Then there are the abductions, the mutilations and the murders. Might it not be that these make the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement impossible?

What of the attitude of the largest nationalist party, at least until recently, to all this? Enter the SDLP stage left.Well, sort of left of centre. It is doubtful if any major party in Northern Ireland has as good a record of constructive engagement and of grim adherence to democratic principles in the years between the formation of the party and the signing of the Agreement.

It hasn�t been easy. The SDLP contested politics in the housing estates as well as the leafy suburbs. It has faced threats, intimidation and murder at the hands of loyalist and republican �supermen�. One of its senators, Paddy Wilson, was butchered in a frenzied attack by loyalists. Meetings of the SDLP in West Belfast in the 1970s were invaded and party members assaulted. The picture of Gerry Fitt, a former leader of the party, standing in the ruins of his Antrim Road home, after it had been wrecked by an ultra-nationalist mob, is one of the enduring images of the Troubles. Another founder member of the party � trade unionist, socialist and author, Paddy Devlin � was driven out of Andersonstown because of his bravely-voiced opposition to the masochistic, quasi-religious hysteria surrounding the Hunger Strikes.

In more recent years, in that bastion of new republicanism, the �boys� from the County Armagh left the SDLP councillor, James Fee, battered and bloodied by the roadside. Former SDLP councillor Hugh Lewsley can tell a fairly similar story from Twinbrook in West Belfast. Other councillors, most notably those in the Larne and Coleraine areas have been on the receiving end of pipe-bomb attacks by loyalists.

Yet the SDLP has never wavered in its commitment to non-violent, democratic change. So, what�s the problem?

The problem is that in the afterglow of the GFA � perhaps the SDLP�s greatest political achievement � the SDLP has learned to cohabit with terror. The sins are of omission rather than commission. In the five years since the signing of the Agreement, the SDLP has learned to live with quite a lot (though of course there have been admonitions and politely-framed questions along the way). The headlines include:

– the rearming of the IRA: the Miami and other gunrunning episodes

– adventures on false passports in the jungle: the Columbia Three (Bring them home, they�re Irish)

– IRA links to the Basque terrorist group, ETA

– smuggling operations, involving millions of pounds worth of smuggled cigarettes and petrol, (for further details contact Mr P O Neill, of the local enterprise development unit, Border View, South Armagh)

– potentially fatal damage to the national livestock industry, north and south, through scams involving the cross-border movement of diseased cattle and the sale of the prohibited animal drug, angel dust

– spying at Castle buildings and compiling a database of addresses of police and prison officers

– the shooting, beating and mutilation of hundreds of nationalists in so-called �punishment� attacks

– the breaking up of families and the exiling of hundreds of nationalists

– the murder � sorry, the elimination of anti-social elements such as half-a-dozen drug dealers � and the killing of the �real� IRA man, Joey O�Connor.

The list goes on. In recent months a republican, Gareth O�Connor, has been abducted in Armagh, probably executed and the body made to �disappear�. The continuing anguish of his family, caught between hope and despair, can only be imagined. The BBC Panorama team has broadcast claims that a Sinn Fein minister in the power-sharing executive, Mr Martin McGuinness, helped entice the Derryman, Frank Hegarty, back from Britain, to face death at the hands of the IRA. The claim is of course libellous, if untrue, but don�t watch this space for impending legal action or, for that matter, vigorous calls for an inquiry from the SDLP.

This catalogue of terror, interspliced with conventional political activity, must be unparalleled in any part of the western world. In no democracy, least of all in the Irish Republic, would another political party consider sharing government with the likes of Sinn Fein and, in effect, with the IRA. Sinn Fein is a Pro-Agreeement Plus party � rather like the First Plus category on the Enterprise Express to Dublin, which comes complete with special privileges. Most of us travel standard class but in terms of political travel republicans are different. They claim all the rights of a conventional political party, which ostensibly Sinn Fein is, and then � covertly through the IRA � a range of extraordinary powers, including those of life and death.

To the surprise of none � apart from the SDLP, it would seem � this has placed an intolerable strain on power-sharing and the peace process more generally. Of all the major parties, the SDLP was best placed to read this tradedy-in-slow-motion. Yet it has remained largely silent on key issues of democracy and constitutionalism.

This might be more explicable if the SDLP felt it had to hold the hand of political republicanism so as to steady the nerves of the �hard men� down the line. This just may have made sense in 1997 and 1998, in the run up to the Agreement and the months succeeding. But no one in the SDLP believes the IRA will go back to war. Armed with this belief (which may of course be misplaced), there is no longer any strategic logic to the SDLP position of indulging gross violations of the Mitchell Principles and the Good Friday Agreement. If it cannot find a resolute voice now, more than 2,000 days into the Agreement, when is it likely to do so? Indeed does the SDLP have any moral line it is prepared to lay down in relation to participation in government? If not, it has no prospect of sustaining the Agreement or of ever attracting votes from across the religious divide. If devolved government fails, the primary responsibility will lie with Sinn Fein and the IRA, but a secondary responsibility lies with the SDLP.

The integrity of democratic institutions is the most fundamental of issues. These have been grievously compromised. Under compulsory power-sharing, Sinn Fein is part of the state (albeit simultaneously in opposition), complete with its own private army and myriad forms of associated corruption. And none of this has gone away.

The SDLP stance on some related issues also merits comment. Broadly speaking, the SDLP has been weak on intimidation and terror, even though much of the current IRA aggression is directed against the nationalist community itself. Alban Maginess in North Belfast is a notable exception. The party has been outspoken, however, on the media �celebrity� cases such as those of the murder victims, Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane. Fine, though there is no doubt these are already well-resourced, highly politicised and powerful campaigns. The fig leaf of justification for largely ignoring a whole range of other, lesser-known cases is that the former involves state collusion and hence are in a different category. They are indeed, but other categories � also �different� and of compelling importance in their own way � should still count. Curiously virtually all of the �celebrity� cases relate to republicans; other nationalist (and unionist) victims are consigned to obscurity, even in the memory of the party. The SDLP tags on to agendas set by others.

Even if one took the selective view that the focus should be largely or exclusively on cases of state collusion, the SDLP shows little consistency. It rightly called for a public inquiry into the atrocity of Bloody Sunday but has shown little stomach for an inquiry into the role of the Irish state and members of the Irish government in attempting to channel guns to the North a few years earlier. I may have missed the small print, but I cannot recall determined support from the SDLP for an inquiry into alleged collusion between members of the Garda and the IRA, linked to several unsolved murders in the border region. And, as I write, one of the former power-sharing ministers in Northern Ireland (see above) is under suspicion, and not for the first time, in a case of murder.

But let us look at one of the other, �different� types of cases. Take the killing of Eamon Collins, from multiple stab wounds within a year of the GFA, on the outskirts of Newry. Freedom of speech and the right to life are among the most basic of societal values. These were denied to Collins, because he dared to criticise publicly Sinn Fein and the IRA. He shrugged off intimidation and went on living in his home town. Is he a martyr to free speech and the town he loved too well? Or is political murder of this kind so insignificant that his widow should be left to grieve alone? Don�t the powerless and the marginalised deserve a bit better?

It is on justice issues, above all, that the SDLP has sounded like an old-fashioned nationalist party. Not content with having gained virtually every provision of the Patten Report, Alex Atwood gratuitously insulted the outgoing police chief who had done so much to implement fundamental reforms to the RUC. Ronnie Flanagan was a �lame duck� commissioner and his departure eagerly anticipated. There was little here to suggest any appreciation of how the RUC, warts and all, had coped with three decades of murderous attacks on its officers, how it had embraced massive institutional change, and how in the final analysis it had secured Northern Irish society from the worst excesses of political terror. The bravery of the RUC in facing down loyalist thugs at Drumcree, summer after summer, the dedicated and long-term policing of loyalist demonstrations outside a Catholic church in Larne, the thankless task of restraining communal bigotry at interface areas in North Belfast and the Short Strand � all were taken for granted or the subject of carping criticism in a miserable spirit of ethnic nationalism.

These set-piece confrontations involved serious injuries, and at Drumcree the murder of one of the police officers, Constable Reilly. A 90% protestant police force in a divided society is not of course desirable. The corollary might also be given weight: the protestant and unionist community has borne the brunt of policing the effects of terrorism, with all of the attendant horrors, over a period of three decades.

The SDLP lacks moral and political vision on the fundamentals of working a power-sharing government in a divided society. While it has called on others to take risks for peace, it is not clear that it has taken any serious risks since the signing of the GFA. These have been neatly tilted on to David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party. Trimble has risked splitting his party down the middle on no less than ten occasions. The SDLP has been content to stay perfectly united, on the sidelines of historical change.

Whatever happened to the SDLP? After all, Mark Durkan is arguably the most gifted and capable politician of his generation of northern nationalists. Sean Farren, Joe Hendron, Brid Rogers and Carmel Hanna command widespread respect. A number of its other MLAs and local councillors have impressive records of community service. Compare these performances with the antics of Barbara de Br�n, who will be remembered mainly for squandering scarce health resources on the translation of texts into Gaelic; or the comic gyrations of the DUP ministers, half-in and half-out of government.

Any explanatory sketch must be tentative at this stage. Perhaps it has to do with the dead hand of John Hume on the party. Like the old farmer who clings to the farm for too long, Hume extended his leadership beyond 1998, largely setting the direction of the party in what amounted to an unconditional accommodation of Sinn Fein and the IRA. We are beginning to reap the whirlwind.