February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The leak of the review into the current state of the Social Democratic and Labor Party has made public a matter that is not only of concern to SDLP members and supporters but to everyone in Ireland who has striven over the years for peace, equality and justice in the North. That is, the prospects for the very survival of the SDLP itself as new political challenges arise.
The review has been quoted for its negative assessments, most famously that the SDLP is too tired and too middle class to compete effectively against the young turks of Sinn Fein, who are threatening its base of support among within certain sections of the nationalist community.
The SDLP’s "pre-eminent position within constitutional nationalism," the review found, "had been eroded to the point where it is now a thing of the past."
This has filled both the Unionist Party and Sinn Fein with glee. The Unionists have used it as proof that the SDLP’s linkage with militant republicanism has been a disaster and should be severed, while Sinn Fein, though not saying anything in public, undoubtedly is smelling in the air the scent of future electoral victories over its nationalist rival.
Leading party spokesmen, such as Mark Durkan of Derry, have dismissed the gloomy conclusions the review has provoked in these and other quarters. Durkan argues that the review was more about perceptions than anything and that is was part of the kind of stock-taking that all parties engage in time and again.
He is right in that some have been predicting the demise of the SDLP since 1983 when Gerry Adams first won West Belfast for Sinn Fein in a British general election. The party has proven over the years that it is not such easy pickings for the republican movement. But this does not mean that its activists can be complacent. There is too much at stake for that.
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The SDLP represents a heroic tradition of consensus politics, upheld through the nightmare years of political violence when the forces of moderation seemed doomed never to have their voices heard. Yet it was people like John Hume, Gerry Fitt, Paddy Devlin, Seamus Mallon, Dr. Joe Hendron, Brid Rodgers, Paddy O’Hanlon and Ivan Cooper, who kept the possibility of a non-violent solution to the North’s problem’s alive. This is a tradition the party’s younger activists, among them Durkan, Alex Atwood, Alban Maginness and Dr. Alasdair McDonnell, have carried through into the hopeful years of the peace process, with all their frustrations and disappointments.
It must not be forgotten that without the SDLP, reviled by violent men from all sides of the sectarian divide, there would be no peace process and no prospect of a peaceful settlement.
For that reason alone, it is essential that the party use this opportunity to take stock, recharge its batteries with the optimism and energy of the young, to move forward into the new millennium as one of the rightful standard bearers of Irish democracy.