The summit included the leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, David Trimble and Gerry Adams, as well as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. But Mark Durkan, the leader of the party that received the largest number of votes in the 1998 Assembly elections, was not invited. Officials said Durkan only found out about the meeting on midnight of the night before it was due to be held.
“We don’t pass the qualifying test of being a problem party,” the SDLP leader said this week.
The meeting was one of the most crucial in the intensive series of talks that started about a month ago and was expected to lead this week to an announcement of a date for new Assembly elections as speculation mounted that the UUP, Sinn Fein and the two governments had brokered a breakthrough deal. The fact that the SDLP, the party that most believe made the peace process possible, was left out has deeply angered party members and dismayed observers.
“It’s the Celtic-versus-Rangers approach to politics,” said SDLP Assembly member for North Belfast and former Belfast Lord Mayor Alban Maginness. “The governments have become so obsessed with the relationship between the UUP and Sinn Fein that they are devoid of imagination about the process. They don’t realize that Trimble and Adams leadership is the problem.”
The Irish and British governments have tried to justify their failure to invite Durkan or any of his team by arguing that what was holding up the prospect of getting a deal was the lack of trust between Sinn Fein and the UUP.
“Those are the two parties that are having difficulties with each other,” a government official said. “There’s no point in inviting every single party to Downing Street if they are not part of the problem.”
Durkan hit back and claimed that it was a product of what he called the “choreography cartel” of Sinn Fein and the UUP to hog the spotlight at the expense of the other parties. He said it breaches the Good Friday agreement that is based on inclusiveness.
“People have their suspicions,” he said. “Why deal only with the parties who gave us suspension, who are doing things now they should have been doing years ago. People will make a distinction between parties holding us back and those who facilitated progress.”
The situation the SDLP faces is seen as bitterly ironic by many party activists who believe that Sinn Fein would never have reached its current prominence had it not been for the talks begun between John Hume, when he was party leader, and Gerry Adams, back in 1993. Since the beginning of the peace process the IRA’s political wing has been steadily gaining electoral ground at the SDLP’s expense. As it has done so, it has grown ever closer to the Irish government, which has been depending on Sinn Fein to neutralize the IRA.
“The Irish government began by saying that they’re working on Sinn Fein,” a leading member of the SDLP said in 2000. “But now they’re working with Sinn Fein.”
In 2001, Sinn Fein secured four Westminster seats at the last British general election, compared to the SDLP’s three. A few months later, Hume resigned from the leadership of the party, which he had held since 1979. Seamus Mallon, another veteran, left the leadership at the same time. In the two years since, the party has entered government with the UUP and Sinn Fein, with Durkan taking the post of deputy first minister. The government was suspended last October after accusations that the IRA was engaged in spying on government officials.
The two governments have been struggling to patch together a deal to restore the government. They cannot do so without the cooperation of the IRA, which means that Sinn Fein has grown increasingly important to the successful outcome of the process. In turn, the SDLP has been increasingly sidelined. SDLP members fear that now it seems that a deal has been struck, involving some major concessions from the IRA, Sinn Fein will be able to claim credit for rescuing the peace process. However, Maginness believes that any deal that emerges “will be half-baked” and may not survive an election campaign.
Critics of the SDLP point out that the party failed to mount an offensive against Sinn Fein, even though it was aware that republicans were pursuing a dual strategy, combining politics without abandoning violent tactics, as they had committed to do under the Good Friday agreement. The SDLP made it impossible to exclude Sinn Fein, so Trimble, the UUP leader, decided he could not do business with the party. The alternative strategy was to deal with Sinn Fein leaders directly and through them put pressure on the IRA.
Meanwhile, Durkan remains upbeat about his party’s ability to hold off the Sinn Fein challenge.
“There’ll be a lot of hype,” he said referring to any deal. “But the process will be caught in the same rut, hostage to the men in the bowler hats of the Ulster Unionist Council and the men in balaclavas on the [IRA] Army Council.”