Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Hard to find positives amid stalemate and stagnation

Stormont civil servants have been running government departments since power-sharing imploded two years ago. Picture by David Young/PA Wire
Stormont civil servants have been running government departments since power-sharing imploded two years ago. Picture by David Young/PA Wire Stormont civil servants have been running government departments since power-sharing imploded two years ago. Picture by David Young/PA Wire

What does it mean for politics here if no Stormont return is in sight? Nobody can know the answer but direction of travel is clear enough.

Trying to transfer into local government will not be for everyone. Some are unlikely to sit around waiting for skies to clear, miracles to happen. Imagining your future in Stormont was one thing, but at least the money was good. Present-day talent, a scarce quality anywhere, will clear off in a burst of frustration and decisiveness. The less decisive will fade, making steadily fewer statements as who can blame them, and maybe becoming ratty when asked for guesses about the future.

It isn’t all about money coming in. Staying on top of special subjects is hard enough when you have a researcher as fired up as yourself, incentive in the shape of rivals in your own party and opponents in other parties, aggressive or at least competitive. Take away the pressure and after a period of new dedication to areas perhaps neglected because of past overwork, performance is bound to slacken. All the more credit to the SDLP’s Nichola Mallon, who slogs away on cuts and under-payments of benefits without noticeably slowing down.

There could be an element of displacement, as well as the dutifulness and commitment she is known for. Mallon seems to be chief confidant and collaborator with Colum Eastwood in the Fianna Fáil project/takeover bid, tick box of choice. Whatever becomes of their dealings, the whole performance will have lasting value as horrible warning or inverse role model; how not to transform your ailing organisation in several painful lessons.

Lesson One, the outfit you hope to parachute into should have a decisive leader. Lesson Two, maintain as many as possible on side while the plan revs up. Lesson One may well not be possible. It had to be Fianna Fáil. There are no good answers in Lesson Two, though at least so far nobody has openly sent for the lawyers. SDLP assets have rarely been worth fighting over.

Other assets are shrinking by the day, media goodwill topping the list. There was a time when the party could coast on its opposition to the IRA, then to Sinn Féin. This has not been true for a long time, a state that older SDLP figures still resent. Media popularity went with the territory. Being the voice of ‘middle’ northern nationalism stopped being an unquestionably good look a long time ago and the fickleness of Dublin is up there with the perfidy of Albion.

But no matter what the resentful claim and perhaps believe, there is not much media love around for republicans, north and south.

Political stalemate here, and the disasters Brexit has wrought even in advance of it happening, have sharpened up a sizeable media section, though, and even more so the world of academe. Katy Hayward and David Phinnemore in particular on Brexit, the tireless David McCann, and human rights experts perhaps demoralised by the long anti-climax of deadlocked, graceless Stormont, are all a sight sharper to read than QUB and UU cadres have been for decades.

The (pricey) book on the Ulster Unionist party by a sizeable squad of authors reads sprightly enough in excerpt, with the likely enough thesis or at least suggestion that the SDLP will be survived by the Ulster Unionists – a party for unionists who cannot bring themselves to give the post-Reverend Ian DUP their vote in any circumstances. Their full-throated opposition to Irish is hardly a surprise, if a bit disgusting. So much for unionist moderation. The finding made sense of Robin Swann’s belated hard line on the subject.

In stalemate and stagnation one consolation is that politics elsewhere offers no better example. Neither the US nor Britain has the excuse of emerging from an age of bloody conflict nor that they face an incoming tide of suffering humanity. Westminster dog-whistling lightweights, the Trump White House, European right-wingers, none of them can be held up as shining lights.

Such comparison, more striking at the moment than ever before, never seems to console those who lament that our politics is hopeless, our political class low-grade. They do so love to sniff from a height, their clincher a despairing prophecy that the lead parties will get an identical vote in the next poll. They aren’t asked often enough what they personally, both the plain people and the sophisticated intellectuals as some paint themselves, would compromise on to make movement possible.

Theirs is the least honest judgment on the present stalemate.