Forty years after its foundation, the SDLP has seemingly fulfilled its purpose of achieving power-sharing within Northern Ireland and having wide-ranging cross-border institutions. But what has become of the SDLP's founding principles and what are the the challenges that it faces as it enters its fifth decade.
From the perspective of the SDLP, the Good Friday Agreement has assumed a Janus-faced appearance. The observation by party's then Deputy Leader, Seamus Mallon, that Agreement represented 'Sunningdale for slow learners' spoke to the fact that Sinn Féin and the IRA had spurned a similar – though more broad-ranging – initiative in 1973-74. Mallon's comment also captured the idea that, like Sunningdale, the Good Friday Agreement was based on the two formative policy goals of the SDLP, which were executive power-sharing and an institutional role for Dublin in the running of the North.
Even in the process of consolidating these key SDLP goals, however, the Good Friday Agreement presented the party with an almost existential dilemma. The subsequent electoral eclipse by Sinn Féin and the resignation of Mallon and its long-standing and widely respected leader, John Hume, seemed to confirm the judgement that the SDLP lacked a vision and a purpose for the new post-conflict dispensation and for twenty-first century Ireland.
Members of its founding generation continue to play a crucial role in guiding the party's direction. This often harks back to a philosophy that is increasingly concerned with the principles and activism of the civil rights era in which they were first politicised. As inspiring as this philosophy is, it also serves to constrain younger SDLP members who respect their forbears' achievements while still longing for political change on 'bread-and-butter' issues such as education and health care reform.
At this crossroads in its development Margaret Ritchie, who assumed the mantel of leadership from Mark Durkan on the eve of the party's fortieth anniversary, has inherited a party that stands at a critical juncture. Its legacy appears to be assured in the eyes of many of its members. Yet that legacy fosters a culture of retrospection that imperils its stated desire to achieve greater equality within Northern Ireland and to move beyond the years of conflict, division and bloodshed in an ethical and just way.
Margaret Ritchie has moved quickly to try to impose her own personality and vision on the party. She has given pointedly nonplussed responses to the idea that the SDLP should team-up with one of the main Southern parties. Likewise, the idea the SDLP should consider a 'major realignment of Northern nationalism' and merge with Sinn Féin was given a frosty reception by the party's elite. Declan O'Loan, the SDLP MLA for North Antrim, who floated the idea, was effectively reprimanded in a series of party statements to the press suggesting that he had committed 'political suicide', that he had gone on an 'unprecedented solo run' and that his idea did 'not represent established party policy'.
Although the SDLP held its three Westminster seats and made some gains in voting turnout in the recent Westminster election, the idea of developing a pan-nationalist front is not so easily dismissed. Certainly, on purely policy terms there exists a great deal of and, indeed, a growing convergence between SDLP and Sinn Féin policies – for example, on reform of the 11-plus transfer system, on social and rural development, on the need to improve health care provision. Similarly, at an ideological level both parties remain committed to prioritising greater harmonisation of legislation and improved economic cooperation with the Republic. Needless to say, both parties continue to espouse an inclusive, all-Ireland framework for dealing with the North's politics.
Where the problems surface, however, is in the divergent ways that Northern nationalist identity is articulated by the two parties. The SDLP's commitment to an 'ethical' dimension to thinking about the past is reflective of its members' experiences of ostracism, intimidation, and overt violence at the hands of Sinn Féin activists during the Troubles. The rhetorical construction of a narrative of the conflict that emphasises its inevitability, the IRA's reaction to British state oppression, and the 'heroic' status of bombers, arsonists, and gunmen such as Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers jars with the collective memory espoused and held by SDLP members. That this narrative occurs on a daily and weekly basis in the nationalist press in Belfast and Derry simply confirms the division within nationalism for many SDLP members.
SDLP policy statements claim that the dilemma is about ethics and morality: 'Unless [the] groups and people are made [to[ account for their conduct, this shadow [of the Troubles] will stretch out into our future'. Unionists would presumably argue that the 'sneaking regard' of moderate nationalists for IRA violence represents something of an Orwellian doublespeak. Undoubtedly, both communities were and are culpable of lax morality as regards their ability to countenance terrorist self-justifications. My own modest research findings, however, suggest that many members of the SDLP hold a sincere and deeply felt abhorrence to the activities of the IRA and the continued attempts of fellow-travellers in the media to repaint the bloody expediency of the conflict.
If this reading is correct then it suggests that the divide within Northern nationalism and the future for the SDLP is based around identity politics – more specifically, around perceptions, experiences and narratives surrounding its past as distinct from its legacy. The outstanding and as yet unaddressed problem for the SDLP is a 'what if'. That is to say, certainly the party can tread a thin line between condemning Sinn Féin's attempt to repaint a past without alienating its voters who ask why it isn't condemning loyalist atrocities. However, once the memories of the Troubles begin to fade – and next year will see first-time voters who were born after the 1994 ceasefire – what response will the SDLP have if Sinn Féin begins to moderate its insistence on eulogising its own past?
