Austin Currie suffered politically and personally for his unrelenting opposition to violence
Not the most successful – the palm goes to John Hume – but in some ways Austin Currie was the best of them all. He was certainly the last of them, the six elected under different banners in the last election to the old Stormont in February 1969 to form the SDLP within a year. They formed the generally progressive, moderately nationalist and unambiguously democratic potential partner with which the bulk of unionism refused to deal before the relentless rise …