Dear Editor, Mary Kenny is mistaken when she refers to the “strange death of the SDLP” (IC 17/08/2017), because the SDLP is far from dead.
Yes, they took a hit in this year’s Westminster election, but that still leaves a substantial group in the Northern Assembly and a sizeable number of councillors. However, longer term decline has been due to an over-reliance on senior figures in the party, especially John Hume, who some SDLP supporters think will one day be made a saint.
Mary touched on the attitude of the Irish Catholic Church to the SDLP in suggesting that they helped bring Sinn Féin in from the cold into “the peace movement”.
I think it’s fair to say that the problems for the SDLP ran a lot deeper than that and went back to the formation of the SDLP in 1970 from the era of the civil rights movement.
My feeling is that the Catholic Church hierarchy never really trusted the SDLP because they “annihilated”, to use Mary’s word, the old Nationalist Party, run mainly by businessmen, and the SDLP was socialist in name and policy.
The Church was more comfortable, in my view, with Sinn Féin, with its hopeless policies and its support for the IRA, which meant that in the 1970s it was going nowhere politically. In 1981, all that changed and the hunger-strikes made Sinn Féin a problem for the Church. The SDLP were more valued then. So time will tell if the SDLP is dead. I think not but who am I to say.
Yours etc.,
John O’Connell, Derry.