Republican News · Thursday 6 March 2003

A party slowly becoming irrelevant

BY FERN LANE

The Ulster Unionists may not be the only party who might be secretly rather relieved that the Stormont Assembly has not been reinstated in time for the elections on 1 May. The SDLP must also be viewing the forthcoming poll, now proposed for 29 May, with increasing anxiety as its newly devised 'Three Gs' (Generation, Gender Geography) strategy and the resultant bitter, ill-disguised infighting over the selection of candidates, plays itself out.

As part of the party leadership's increasingly desperate attempts to attract more - or even some - of the nationalist youth vote, established candidates have, with uncharacteristic ruthlessness, been elbowed out of the way by party strategists in favour of younger models. A furious Annie Courtney has been unceremoniously deselected in the Waterside constituency in Derry in favour of her fellow councillor and relative newcomer, Gerard Diver, and John Tierney has been offered a paper job as 'Party Manager' in order to make way for his near-neighbour in the Bogside, Pat Ramsey.

Rumours have it that Courtney is now contemplating standing as an independent. But it is not just in Derry that these manoeuvrings have gone on; it seems that party members have been at loggerheads over candidate selection in West Belfast, Strangford, and elsewhere.

Of course, there are others aside from the SDLP and the UUP who are equally panicky about the prospect of elections and the possibility that Sinn Féin may move further ahead in the polls. Those others have succeeded in removing 130,000 voters from the register and have failed to register 57,000 first time voters.

The absence of the votes of young nationalists, who mostly vote for Sinn Féin, is likely to be of benefit the SDLP, one reason perhaps why it has been remarkably silent on the issue of disenfranchisement.

To this day, the SDLP cannot quite grasp its decline in fortune and is visibly floundering in its attempts to tackle the problem. The belief that sticking the young(ish) face of a, sometimes local, sometimes parachuted-in, candidate on an election poster will be sufficient to inspire young people to vote for the party is patronising and not likely to bring them much success.

The reasons for the SDLP's long-term failure to capture a significant proportion of the 18-24 vote, and the gradual falling away of older voters, seem to be obvious to everyone but the party themselves. Firstly, historically the party was built almost entirely on personalities who, whilst undoubtedly thoroughly upstanding characters, never actually held much appeal for the young. Their parents might well have voted for their local SDLP candidate on the basis that the party contained people like Hume, Mallon, Rogers and McGrady, but now they have gone the party is struggling to make itself a genuine proposition on the basis of its policies. Which brings us to the second reason.

The SDLP's particular brand of fearful, heads-down, mouths-shut nationalism simply does not attract first-time nationalist voters. Indeed, voters of all ages are making it clear that they do not want to lower their horizons, to settle for less; settle for an almost entirely unreformed police force as the SDLP would have them do; settle for a intrusive and aggressive British military presence; settle for a second-rate justice system; settle for less than all the rights to which they are entitled. They don't want to wait for unionism to get over itself.

Prospective Sinn Féin candidate Raymond McCartney summed it up when he observed that the SDLP had "lost its nerve" during the Weston Park talks on policing, settling for the British government's take-it-or-leave-it offer (Sinn Féin left it), only to try and grab the credit for the subsequent, but still inadequate, amendments to the Policing Act, due to come before the British parliament later this month.

Further, the party has been never been there on the streets when nationalist communities were under attack by loyalists, but seems amazed when people (and not just those in the affected areas) reward them by casting their votes elsewhere. You could go to the Short Strand at any time of the day or night and the chances are the first person you would encounter is Sinn Féin's Joe O'Donnell.

Rather than fighting on behalf of nationalists, the SDLP have used their presence in the Assembly largely to attack Sinn Féin, when what they should have been doing, both for the good of their party and of their constituents, was confronting the obstructions and downright unreason of unionists. When the British government collapsed the Assembly at the behest of unionism, the SDLP spent most of its time blaming republicans for the resulting "mess" - as Mark Durkan put it recently.

But perhaps the most worrying thing of all for the SDLP is that it is slowly becoming irrelevant to the political system in the Six Counties as a whole. Their function as a barrier against republicanism is being eroded as Sinn Féin's mandate increases and as that role disappears they, and the electorate, are left wondering what, exactly, the SDLP is for.