Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: SDLP/Fianna Fáil move will be put to the test soon enough

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and SDLP leader Colum Eastwood at a press conference last month in Belfast. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and SDLP leader Colum Eastwood at a press conference last month in Belfast. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and SDLP leader Colum Eastwood at a press conference last month in Belfast. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire

The Big Wind that is Brexit will go on shaking politics here, driving Sleeping Stormont further into the undergrowth.

What has happened inside the SDLP is a sharp reminder of what vacuum plus challenge will do to most organisations, especially the shakiest. Losing your most sparky youth must be particularly painful when for years you have been mocked as aged and feeble. That some of the party’s biggest names from the past are on the same side as the angry young rubs the sore place rawer. Chairs of the LGBT+ and women’s group opposing the leadership - alongside Alban Maginness, one-time convener of Stormont’s cross-party Right to Lifers? Alas, poor Colum Eastwood.

What do the voters think? Many SDLP faithful are ageing, with a skim of more recent supporters. Over the party’s good years, most of them the north’s worst years, strong media performers sustained their voters. What Brid Rodgers and Seamus Mallon as well as John Hume said and how they said it mattered, a source of pride and hope to people who sometimes despaired as republicans killed and died in the name of Ireland.

What veteran voters make of a plan to ‘establish a formal policy partnership with Fianna Fáil’ will emerge soon enough. Or at least some sense of it will. The closest anyone here will come, for a lengthy while, to expressing political opinions in a measurable way, will be the local government elections in a couple of months. Only the anorakiest anoraks are excited in advance about the precise make-up of the 11 ‘super-councils’. Confusion among voters seems inevitable.

They will have to factor in, if they can figure it out, this newly formalised relationship with Fianna Fáil. The dissenters from that Newry vote will be out canvassing, or so they said straight afterwards. But canvassing for a party they believe is on the wrong path, chosen they say in an improper fashion? Questions on the doorsteps should be fun.

A common thread in all or most disagreement about the link with Fianna Fáil was that it had served the SDLP well to be friends with all the main Dáil parties, linked formally to none. Over the good/bad years, through the political desert of the Troubles, political support from across the border had considerable emotional force. Labour, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael delegates turned up for decades to the SDLP annual conference, the first two to a roughly equal welcome, Fine Gael a cooler third.

The Garret FitzGerald relationship was directly with Hume. The Charles Haughey years tested SDLP internal dynamics, followed by the strain of the ‘peace process’.

But FF taoisigh Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern put their backs into producing the Good Friday Agreement, ahead of Haughey’s disgrace, the economic crash, Fianna Fáil’s – and Labour’s - electoral collapse.

Sinn Féin’s eclipse of the SDLP meanwhile was paralleled by its rise in the south. Hard-headed former SDLP voters plus the biggest slice of young first-time nationalist voters saw the older party as not nearly strong enough against the DUP, lacking SF energy and effectively snubbed by Irish and British governments in its favour.

How will Brexit, and late SDLP policy-making, feed into nationalist/republican voting? It might be some time before scientific study can track the effects but a dinky little straw poll turned up one surprise, a lifelong attitude turned inside out.

‘I would like to see a united Ireland but I don’t think it’s going to come through the SDLP and Fianna Fáil joining up.’ This is a ‘countryman’ living in Belfast most of his life, though coloured still by an upbringing on the border. Distaste for Fianna Fáil has grown in him, ‘Charlie Haughey and the corruption, what they were at for years, boys handing fistfuls of money to them. And the fancy shirts, and the wine flowing.’

Ah now, wait. Though never judgmental and a belated wine admirer himself, this is an orthodox Catholic if clear-eyed about the church’s failings. Did Micheál Martin weighing in for Repeal the 8th turn him anti-Fianna Fáil? Definitely not. ‘It’s a changing world. There’s a lot of people think differently today than last year.’

And what has helped change minds is Brexit. ‘Leo Varadkar has done well, Coveney too. If I had a choice I’d vote for Coveney. If Eastwood had gone for Fine Gael, now...’ In the May election? ‘Don’t know. It’s bad temper I can’t stand. I’ve a lot of respect for Naomi Long, and that fella Robin Swann.’

Re-thinking northern nationalism has some way to go.