Billy Leonard, former preacher in the protestant Church of the Seventh Day adventists, and with has 5 years service to the RUC on his CV, has left the SDLP, for which he was a councillor, and moved to Sinn Féin, for which he is now the first councillor in overwhelmingly unionist Coleraine, Co Derry.
The local newspaper called it a "bombshell." The DUP won't speak to him, won't even look at him, it says. The SDLP is wounded. Sinn Féin is crowing. Republican dissidents say it proves Sinn Féin has sold out. "A lot of people are shocked," Leonard admits. "The atmosphere at last week's council meeting was heavy and frosty. I've mostly smiled."
Leonard, who is 49, was born the son of a policeman in bitterly divided Lurgan. His mother was an early member of the Alliance party. "I learned the British version of Irish history. I remember being in a history class at school when the teacher came in from listening to the radio and told us Stormont had been prorogued. I remember unionists claiming the the bodies on Bloody Sunday had been brought in from elsewhere."
He joined the RUC reserve in the bloody mid 70's. To fight the IRA? "I joined to do something in a reasonable manner," he replies. "I saw RUC victims, and victims of the RUC. The loyalist paramilitary links of some police and soldiers in the area were well known."
He was going out with Valerie by then, a catholic from one of the 'republican' estates in Lurgan. "We never met in the same place at the same time. I never called to her home." It wasn't his police colleagues they feared. It was the IRA. He left the police because he got "brassed off".
The couple married and moved to England in the 1980's, returning to the North in 1993. Both attended the Seventh Day Adventist church, and he preached. "It was normal," he says. "I drifted away. I'm extremely comfortable now without any religious label. The bigger thing for me was my evolving Irish identity."
The peace process was getting underway in 1993, and Leonard was drawn to the SDLP. "John Hume was playing a major part. The SDLP was way ahead at that stage." He joined the party. He claims he began calling for debate about reform within the party immediately after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. "I quickly felt the lack of focus was beginning to tell," he says.
In 2001, he was elected as a councillor, one of four SDLP representatives sitting with 17 unionists. The introduction of the d'Hondt principles saw his colleague, John Dallat, became the first nationalist mayor of Coleraine that year.
"During the elections a fair number of people were saying they would vote for me in the local elections because there was no Sinn Féin candidate, but they would vote Sinn Féin rather than for Dallat in the Westminster elections. You knew the shift was on."
Dallat, who is militantly anti-Sinn Féin, encouraged Leonard and the SDLP worked hard to get him elected. The SDLP has accused Leonard of putting "personal ambition before the principles he was elected on." Party leader, Mark Durkan, denies Leonard's claims that he has persistently voiced concerns about the leadership and direction of the party.
In an icey statement, Durkan noted that the concern Leonard had most recently expressed to him was to be appointed as a ministerial advisor in the executive. "The possibility of getting more interesting and rewarding work had naturally arisen," says Leonard.
He admits he began private talks with Sinn Féin well before last November's elections, during which he was Dallat's election agent. He wants to rebut any suggestion he moved to be on the winning side. "The bad election was the symptom of something Billy Leonard had felt for years," he says. He has that habit of talking about himself in the third person.
How will he feel, working side by side with people who killed his former colleagues in the RUC? "I can put the idea of conflict into the bigger world picture," he says. He wrote a doctoral thesis on state and paramilitary violence, and last week was one of the organizers of an international conference on peacebuilding.
"For me, the Agreement moved the goalposts," says Leonard. "It was no longer SDLP anti violence, Sinn Féin, violence. Look at the number of SDLP voters who have transferred to Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin has the all Ireland vision. It is the major player for the foreseeable future."
