Still hoping to build bridges

The SDLP may be down but it’s not out, writes Greg Daly

Sinn Féin’s victory in the West Tyrone by-election this month was not unexpected, but though Órfhlaith Begley comfortably succeeded her party colleague Barry McElduff, winning 46% of the vote, a more interesting story might be told by looking at shifting vote shares.

Just last year, in the last UK general election, Mr McElduff won 50.7% of the vote, with the SDLP’s Daniel McCrossan coming in third with a mere 13%. This time, however, Sinn Féin’s  vote dropped 4% , while the SDLP one rose 4.9% to 17.9%.

It’s a small increase, but a real one, and one that might invite the question of whether this might be a bellwether pointing to a change of fortune for the Social and Democratic Labour Party, the party that has surely done more for the cause of peace in Ireland than any other over the last half century but that has seemed in steady decline for a decade or more, and that now looks in danger of being forgotten as a historical actor never mind a living movement.

Threat

This threat to the SDLP could hardly have been better depicted than in a Sunday Business Post feature to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, with the magazine cover advertising this featuring the American chief negotiator, the heads of the British and Irish governments, the Ulster Unionist and Sinn Féin party leaders, and Ian Paisley even though the DUP opposed the agreement and the process that led to it.

Conspicuous by his absence from the cover was the SDLP’s leader John Hume, despite his role as, in effect, more than any other the driving force behind the Peace Process and the guiding genius of the Good Friday Agreement.

With the SDLP being so consigned to history by some, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that recent months have seen a resurgence of an old idea, mooted every so often during Mark Durkan’s time as leader of the party, that the SDLP should merge with Fianna Fáil as an all-Ireland nationalist party.

For former party chair and MLA Alban Maginness, however, talk of the SDLP’s demise is premature.

“The task of the SDLP – and the SDLP has transformed politics North and South – is not finished. The mission of the SDLP was to reconcile the people of Ireland.  That’s the real task of the SDLP, and until that is done,  the SDLP’s mission is not completed,” he tells The Irish Catholic.

“Sinn Féin can’t do it, Fianna Fáil can’t do it, Fine Gael can’t do it,” says the former Belfast Lord Mayor, the first Catholic to hold the position. “Nobody can do it except the SDLP – it just has that capacity to do it and act as a bridge between North and South.”

Alone in Ireland the SDLP has a track record for the kind of thinking and openness that can bring communities together, he continues.

“It just has that historic record of initiatives.  Sunningdale wouldn’t have happened without the SDLP.  The Anglo-Irish agreement wouldn’t have happened without the SDLP. The Good Friday Agreement wouldn’t have happened without the SDLP.

“There are lots of other things that wouldn’t have happened, but those are the three main things, and those are the three transformative events in our recent history,” he says. “Take the SDLP out of the equation – none of those things would have happened and the situation here would simply have festered and got worse and worse.”

All this is undoubtedly true, but the SDLP was previously the leading party of Catholic and nationalistic opinion in the North, whereas those days look long gone now, with younger voters who have forgotten the Troubles turning to Sinn Féin while older ones, perhaps disenchanted by the party getting bogged down in debates around same-sex marriage and even abortion, seemingly staying home.

“The SDLP has been in worse situations before than this one,” Mr Maginness maintains. “It’s been really at the blunt end of an appalling vista of violence and instability.”

Things are different now, he says. “We don’t have that blunt end of violence and instability; we have a sectarian stalemate and we’ve got to work our way through that sectarian stalemate. We’ve got to release that in some way. I’m not sure how you do it, but that is the task of the SDLP.”

Risk

It’s surely fair to say that it’s hard to see any party other than the SDLP bridging gaps both within the North’s communities and between North and South, but it’s hard not to wonder whether this analysis comes down to “the SDLP will continue, because Ireland needs SDLP to continue”. So it might, but do voters realise this?

The SDLP undoubtedly has a real problem positioning itself in the democratic space of modern Northern Ireland, where it stands a risk of being consumed by Sinn Féin if it makes any serious moves.

For Rosemary Flanagan, another former party chair and nowadays chair of the party’s Enniskillen Branch and its Fermanagh and Omagh District Executive, politics is in flux everywhere now with the North being far from immune to this.

In the North, she says, speaking in a personal capacity, the flux has been worsened by the refusal of Sinn Féin and the DUP, as the region’s two currently dominant parties, to allow progress in the most basic issues.

Some people seemingly decided to vote for those parties in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement in the hope that bringing them together in a political context would encourage them to heal the North’s problems, she says, but others did so to protect and strengthen their particular identities.

“The result has been a totally negative experience for all – a descent into ever more hardline sectarian politics which has further polarised our communities. And now no political party in NI has the power to achieve progress in Northern Ireland, not even the DUP despite its temporary alliance with the Westminster government,” she says.

“And now without Stormont there is a lack of structures to enable us to take control of the instability and to manage the increasing problems thrown up by lack of direction,” she says.

Abstention from voting is a serious problem for the party nowadays, she says, as people give up on a process that seems no longer able to deliver, while moderate voices are drowned out, and although young people continue to join the SDLP, so too do they leave the party as they are driven to emigrate to find career opportunities elsewhere.

Highlighting the party’s ongoing commitment to a caring capitalism that protects the rights of workers, Mrs Flanagan [pictured left] says the party is also caught between priorities.

“Is it about establishing preferred identity or is it more about financial security?” The coming withdrawal of the UK from the EU poses challenges for both of these directions, she says.

At the same time, she remains hopeful. “In the West Tyrone by-election we potentially saw that the 4% of voters leaving SF and returning to SDLP may be the beginning of a realisation that Sinn Féin politics are not working in their best interests,” she says.

If it’s the beginning, it’s a tentative one.