This may seem like a strange question to ask of the party that was instrumental in bringing about one of the most successful conflict resolution situations in the world – the Northern Ireland peace process. But the SDLP’s recent history has raised it time and again, as people have watched its support among nationalists slip even as the peace process took hold. This time round, it suffered a loss of six seats compared to what it had in the old Assembly, dropping from 24 to 18.
This represents an exact reversal of the 1998 situation after the first Assembly elections when it had 24 seats to Sinn Fein’s 18. The party’s troubles have even sparked off speculation that plans are being considered to amalgamate it with Fianna Fail.
Many see the result as just the latest and most costly symptom of an underlying malaise from which the party has been suffering for almost a decade – since, in fact, the beginning of the peace process. However, it could be argued that the malaise was always there and that the peace process has just allowed it to manifest itself more clearly.
David McKittrick, the veteran Northern Ireland journalist, once defined the SDLP as “John Hume surrounded by enemies.” McKittrick was using poetic license to point to the fact that almost since its inception, the SDLP was not so much a political party as a collection of fiefdoms, each with its own chieftain. Hume ruled in Derry, Gerry Fitt, the former party leader, in West Belfast, Seamus Mallon in Armagh, Austin Curry in Tyrone, Eddie O’Grady in South Down and Ivan Cooper in South Derry.
However, they were a formidable team; what they lacked in party organization was made up for in vision. The SDLP represented an amalgam of civil rights protesters, labor activists and progressive nationalists, a product of the optimism and political verve of the 1960s which sought to clean the cobwebs off of Northern Irish nationalist politics. The SDLP vision tried to incorporate all of these strands into a power-sharing executive, with cross-border links, and an Irish dimension in the shape of a Council of Ireland.
It sprang briefly into life in the form of the Sunningdale Agreement, which set up the first power-sharing government in Stormont in 1974. That it was doomed after a few months disheartened Hume and the others, but did not deter them. For the next 20 years they would pursue the same vision in the midst of some of the worse violence that Ireland had ever seen. In spite of the violence, the 1960s optimism never really died out, largely thanks to Hume who persisted through the decades in his belief that the politics of inclusion could work in Northern Ireland.
It paid off in 1998, with the signing of the Good Friday agreement. Three years later, Hume and Mallon retired from the SDLP’s leadership. How did their legacy of political success turn into political defeat at the hands of Sinn Fein?
The problem for the party was that Hume’s legacy had also enabled Sinn Fein to grow into a serious political rival. Hume had nurtured Sinn Fein’s entry into the peace process. Even after the IRA broke its first ceasefire, in February 1996, Hume did not pull back from his supportive role. A second opportunity to do so arose after the agreement was signed in April 1998. At that point, some thought that the symbiotic relationship between the two parties should end and Sinn Fein left to fare on its own.
The new leader, Mark Durkan, inherited this tradition of holding back from attacking Sinn Fein and treating it like the political rival that in fact it was. Even when the SDLP did criticize Sinn Fein it was by innuendo, as in November 2001 during Durkan’s first speech as party leader. He said:
“We in the SDLP have never had a hardware counter, when we set out our political stall. Our only force is the force of argument – we have no army. No guns, no bullets, no bombs, no plastic explosives and, we will ensure, no plastic bullets.”
While everyone knew which party he was talking about, he never named it. This coyness meant that when Durkan and Gerry Adams were debating the issue of policing, the SDLP leader never even alluded to the IRA, nor brought up the issue of racketeering and punishment beatings, issues which are surely linked to that of supporting the police. So it was ironic to hear Durkan complain in an interview with the Irish Times just after the last election that Sinn Fein was fooling the electorate in the Irish republic.
“There is the new clean image of Sinn Fein,” he said. “It can’t hide the fact of what they have done in the past. People give them a very big indulgence.” If the SDLP leader wanted to make a case out of “what they have done” then the proper time was during the election. Instead, the SDLP did not even criticize the republican movement for failing to carry out the act of completion that the Irish and British governments had demanded in their Joint Declaration last spring.
The effect of this reticence was to profoundly alter the course of the peace process. The Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble realized that when it came to a crisis involving allegations of republican misconduct, the SDLP would always side with Sinn Fein, and resist calls for the suspension of Sinn Fein ministers from the devolved government.
In October 2002, following allegations of an IRA spy-ring operating in Stormont, the British government suspended the government, and Trimble decided that the time had come to forget about the SDLP and deal directly with Sinn Fein in the search for a solution that would end IRA activity for good and guarantee the stability of the institutions.
The SDLP had made itself redundant. This became obvious when the British and Irish governments neglected to invite them to London to an important summit meeting involving Trimble and Adam a few weeks before the recent elections.
The SDLP’s constant stand alongside Sinn Fein has made the party almost indistinguishable from the IRA’s political wing. Before the peace process, the SDLP’s politics based on nonviolence and constitutional reform clearly set it apart from Sinn Fein. But since Sinn Fein has become identified with the peace process, the SDLP has been unable to evolve a new political strategy. In 2001, during the British general election, Alex Atwood, its candidate for West Belfast, tried to out-green Sinn Fein and failed disastrously. During last month’s assembly elections, the party concentrated its attacks on the Democratic Unionist Party. According to the Irish Times, this tactic may have actually encouraged some Ulster Unionists to vote DUP.
The problem for the SDLP is that even if they had come out with guns blazing against Sinn Fein, tackling their association with the IRA, it may not have worked. The younger nationalist voter can no longer remember the time when Sinn Fein spokesmen would spend their time justifying IRA actions or explaining away IRA atrocities. Sinn Fein’s success in penetrating the middle class area of South Belfast proves that to the new generation of nationalists the past is not important, if it’s remembered at all. For almost a decade, Adams has been a spokesman for peace. The question is, on behalf of what does Mark Durkan and the SDLP now speak?