February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The SDLP and Sinn Fein face off against each other knowing that the stakes are high. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams may be fighting to protect his credibility in light of the Robert McCartney killing and the Northern Bank heist, but the SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, is fighting for his political life.
With this in mind, Durkan launched his party’s new document on Irish unity, “A Better Way to a Better Ireland?” on Monday at the Mansion House in Dublin. Durkan unveiled the document in Belfast, later traveling to Dublin and Newry.
The SDLP’s pitch is clear: it is the party to convince unionists of the merits of a sovereign, independent Ireland, not Sinn Fein, which has fatally undermined any peripheral trust it may have built up with unionists through the negotiation of the Good Friday agreement.
Durkan maintained that Sinn Fein has caused severe damage to the nationalist cause. He points out that alleged IRA criminality has tarnished Sinn Fein and disenfranchised the people who voted for it.
Sinn Fein now finds no favor in the political corridors of Dublin, London or Washington, he claimed.
On paper, the SDLP’s current strategy makes good sense. Prior to the breakdown of talks last December, it was waiting for the second foot to fall. Sinn Fein, 12 months after outpolling the SDLP in the Assembly elections, appeared to be on the verge of concluding a historic agreement with the DUP that would have involved the effective disbandment of the IRA.
While the SDLP undoubtedly had problems with the draft agreement, the party would have great difficulty, had the deal stuck, in painting Sinn Fein as sellouts. Sinn Fein would have probably benefited from a huge wave of good will from the nationalist electorate and taken two, if not all three, SDLP seats in the Westminster elections.
However, the robbery of the Northern Bank in December and the brutal murder by IRA members of Robert McCartney in late January have dented Sinn Fein’s electoral ambitions. SDLP insiders claim that while Newry and Armagh, the seat held by former deputy leader Seamus Mallon, is lost to Sinn Fein’s Conor Murphy, the party should easily hold Foyle (Durkan’s constituency) and South Down (Eddie McGrady’s). Such optimism before Christmas was in short supply.
Durkan is now attempting to drive home some of the advantage accrued to him in recent months. While political leaders elsewhere might regard the loss of a seat as a poor showing, the significant thing for the SDLP leader is that he wins his own electoral battle and holds John Hume’s seat.
Were Durkan to lose, the party would most likely crumble amid internal recrimination. Calls for a merger with a southern party would increase in volume, though they would likely be too little too late.
The Unity document, so the thinking goes, appeals to the sort of straightforward nationalists that have abandoned the SDLP in recent years. It also aims to win back those voters who invested a vote in Sinn Fein with the belief that an increased mandate would speed forward IRA disbandment.
It retains the agreement as a core part of any united Ireland with a regional assembly in the North, aspires to unity referenda North and South and envisages Northern TDs being elected to the Dail.
Durkan has argued that unionists will never trust Sinn Fein. The implication is that the SDLP’s softly softly approach is more suited to winning over Northern Protestants to the notion of a unitary Irish state.
The SDLP leader is betting that patience is running out among Sinn Fein’s newest converts and that his party stands to entice them back into the fold of constitutional nationalism.
Certainly the Irish government and the rest of the Southern parties are hoping that Durkan survives.
At the Dublin launch, Durkan was photographed between the beaming Liz O’Donnell of the Progressive Democrats and Liz McManus of Labor. Later that evening in Newry, Ireland’s foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, turned up to lend his endorsement to the document.
Ahern, as is now commonplace at Irish government briefings and press conferences, used the event to target Sinn Fein. Comparing Gerry Adams’s party to a bunch of “snake-oil salesman,” Ahern dismissed Sinn Fein’s call for a green paper on Irish unity.
“Like the snake-oil salesmen of the American West, the proponents of a Green Paper advance it as a panacea for all our ills; it is not,” Ahern said. “Those advancing it are in fact impeding the drive toward unity by distracting attention from the immediate priorities of getting the institutions of the Agreement back to full working order.”
Ahern’s tacit support for the SDLP is nothing new. Prior to the Assembly elections of 2003, Fianna Fail endorsed Durkan as its Northern politician of choice. It was sorely disappointed that Sinn Fein then managed to build upon its good performance in the Westminster elections with a resounding victory over the SDLP.
It is again unlikely that the renewed public support will have the desired effect for the SDLP. While the party’s electoral prospects are certainly rosier than they were before Christmas, Sinn Fein still stands to make inroads into its vote. A recent Belfast Telegraph opinion poll put support for the two nationalist parties neck-and-neck, at 20 percent each. However, the same paper grossly underestimated Sinn Fein’s support in 2003 and put the SDLP well ahead in the days before polling.
When taking this into consideration, along with the fact that republicans will have an unrivalled electoral machine to call upon, the opinion poll is not as reassuring for the SDLP as it first appears.
Whether talk of a United Ireland at this late stage will be enough to salvage SDLP support remains to be seen.