February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
His speech in Belfast’s Conway Mill (where IRA members once defended their community from loyalist invaders) was billed by Sinn Fein’s press office as unprecedented and historically significant.
Adams, flanked by senior republicans, invited the paramilitary organization to embrace politics as an alternative arena of struggle. While Adams’s words may not have been couched in the dramatic terms some might have preferred that he use, they are nonetheless momentous.
A general order for the IRA to stand down could reinvigorate the flagging political process and most likely force the Rev. Ian Paisley’s DUP into a deal with Sinn Fein.
In the short term, Adams’s speech will have also set SDLP nerves on edge. SDLP leader Mark Durkan’s future still hangs in the balance. He faces Sinn Fein chairman Mitchel McLaughlin in the Foyle constituency, knowing that defeat could mean the end of his tenure as SDLP leader.
McLaughlin will be making a concerted bid to claim the Derry seat for Sinn Fein. With former SDLP leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume stepping aside, the party will no longer be able to call on the huge personal vote he had nurtured for more than 30 years.
Durkan will be fighting the seat on nothing other than his own reputation and knows that any move by the IRA has the potential to make life difficult for him.
The SDLP enjoys a majority of 1,500 votes in Foyle going on 2003’s Assembly elections. While the likes of David Trimble would be delighted to be going into an election in such a position (the UUP leader has a margin of fewer than 400 in his own Upper Bann constituency) it is still too close for Durkan to relax.
Were the IRA to follow through on Adams’s comments with acts of decommissioning accompanied by a statement signaling a final decision to stand down, then all bets would be off for Durkan and his party.
Nationalist voters (particularly those who had been frightened off by the Northern Bank heist and Robert McCartney sagas) could conceivably reward the Sinn Fein leadership with a substantial electoral boon.
However, Adams’s comments Monday may have given Durkan something to work with. The Sinn Fein leader quashed rumors that the IRA is preparing to wind down within days. Adams maintains that the organization is currently debating the way forward and that this process needs to be given time.
The longer time frame anticipated by Adams could work to Durkan’s advantage.
Critics of the republican movement argue that by setting up the issue of IRA disbandment at the start of an election campaign, Adams is merely attempting to deflect attention away from the McCartney crisis with vague promises of a better future. They claim that Adams will continue to tantalize the nationalist electorate with the prospect of IRA disbandment throughout the campaign, increase the Sinn Fein vote, and then retreat until the next election, when the IRA card will be played again.
If Durkan can sell this analysis to the floating nationalist constituency the SDLP may be able to chart some sort of path out of its immediate difficulties.
However, Adams’s personal standing in the eyes of nationalist voters is not clear. There is no indication whether republicans have grown disgruntled with his leadership over the last four months.
There may be every possibility that they, looking to enhance the hand of the republican movement’s peaceniks, will vote in larger numbers for the party than ever before.
The recent Belfast Telegraph opinion poll that put Sinn Fein on a level pegging with the SDLP showed that the party’s support remained strong and was in fact growing. A poll taken for the same newspaper before the Assembly elections in 2003 seriously underestimated support for Sinn Fein and wrongly predicted that the SDLP would top the polls in nationalist districts.
Meanwhile, the UUP leader, Trimble, is in serious trouble. The DUP is confident that it can steal his Westminster seat, thus likely delivering the fatal blow to his political career.
Trimble has reportedly had problems in recruiting a decent canvassing team and finds it hard to go dooe to door in staunchly loyalist Portadown where he has been accused of selling out to Sinn Fein. Unionist sources also say he encounters hostility in Banbridge, one of the main urban centers in the constituency.
The DUP’s David Simpson has worked hard at narrowing the gap in recent years and has increased his profile in the area through his work on the local council.
Trimble is not the only UUP candidate with a fight on his hands.
The decision of UK Unionist leader Bob McCartney to withdraw from the race in North Down has given the DUP’s Peter Weir a free run at Sylvia Hermon.
In East Antrim. the UUP’s Roy Beggs has all but been written off as a potential winner.
In South Belfast, Trimble’s close colleague Michael McGimpsey is in a dogfight with the DUPs’ Jimmy Spratt. Spratt, who is a former head of the staunchly unionist Police Federation, has won the endorsement of two senior Ulster Unionist members: former South Belfast MP Martin Smyth and former UUP leader James Molyneaux.
In South Antrim, David Burnside will be looking over his shoulder at the DUP’s Willie McCrea.
Yet again the so-called “middle ground” is being squeezed by the DUP and Sinn Fein. Just how much of it is left come May 6 remains to be seen.