Northern Ireland

SDLP at 50: Austin Currie recalls birth of new political force

Fifty years on from the launch of the SDLP, founding member Austin Currie tells political correspondent John Manley how nationalism's new political force came into being

Austin Currie (second from right) in 1999 with what was then the four other remaining co-founders of the SDLP – Gerry Fitt, John Hume, Paddy O'Hanlon and Ivan Cooper. Picture by Brendan Murphy
Austin Currie (second from right) in 1999 with what was then the four other remaining co-founders of the SDLP – Gerry Fitt, John Hume, Paddy O'Hanlon and Ivan Cooper. Picture by Brendan Murphy Austin Currie (second from right) in 1999 with what was then the four other remaining co-founders of the SDLP – Gerry Fitt, John Hume, Paddy O'Hanlon and Ivan Cooper. Picture by Brendan Murphy

ALTHOUGH its founders wished to create a “radical force in politics”, it was concern about a possible association with hallucinogenic drugs that finally swung the argument for placing ‘Social Democrat’ ahead of ‘Labour’ in the newly-conceived party’s name.

Austin Currie recalls how fellow SDLP founding member Paddy Devlin had been arguing the opposite before suddenly exclaiming with characteristic colour: “F*** – the f****** LSD f****** party!”.

Discussions about a name were among many that took place in the run-up to the formation of the Social Democratic & Labour Party 50 years ago.

It was a time of violent upheaval and political flux in the north.

The SDLP was one of four prominent political parties that emerged over a very short period into what for the previous half century had effectively been a one-party state.

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Alongside the SDLP, Provisional Sinn Féin and Alliance both came into being in 1970, while the following year saw the foundation of the DUP.

Of the SDLP’s six founding members – Ivan Cooper, Paddy Devlin, Paddy O’Hanlon, John Hume, Gerry Fitt and Austin Currie – only the latter is still alive.

Now 80, the former Stormont MP for East Tyrone spoke to The Irish News from his home in Kildare.

He’s been based south of the border on a permanent basis for more than 30 years, having accepted an invitation in 1989 from then Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald to represent West Dublin in the Dáil.

When serious discussions began in the late 1960s about the forming a new party that was “left of centre, with an emphasis on bread and butter policies”, Mr Currie was an MP representing the Nationalist Party in what was then the Northern Ireland Parliament.

He’d gained a wider profile in the summer of 1968 when he squatted in a house in Caledon, Co Tyrone that had been allocated by Dungannon Rural District Council to a 19-year-old unmarried Protestant woman.

“Their hegemony was based on a sectarian headcount, and buttressed by gerrymandering and discrimination,” is how he characterises the unionist administration of the time.

In the decade preceding the SDLP’s formation, he recalls, there’d been ongoing efforts to bring the disparate components and personalities of political nationalism under a single umbrella.

Until the civil rights movement helped them coalesce, they were akin to what he calls “bishops in their constituencies”, defined largely by their opposition to unionism.

Mr Currie had made it clear when accepting the nomination as the Nationalist Party’s candidate that he aspired to be involved in a new party that had “proper organisation, local branches and an annual conference”.

Others were making similar noises. He was first introduced to John Hume’s thinking when some years previous the future Foyle MP wrote a newspaper article that chimed with his own outlook.

They met, as many of the other founding members did, while active in the civil rights movement.

“His thoughts were similar to what I was already saying and I could see that there was an opportunity to involve him in some new political organisation,” Mr Currie recalls of his recently deceased colleague.

“And then when elected as an independent in 1969, Hume made it clear he wanted to part of a new political movement.”

He remembers how selling the idea to the “similarly inclined” civil rights activists and freshly-elected independent Stormont MPs Ivan Cooper and Paddy O’Hanlon was relatively straightforward compared to convincing Republican Labour Westminster MP Gerry Fitt and his associate Paddy Devlin of the Northern Ireland Labour Party to come on board.

“That proved more difficult – Gerry was very much an individualist.

“He and Devlin at that stage worked very closely despite the latter being in the Labour Party, which was partitionist.”

Fitt and Devlin eventually signed up to the idea but insisted ‘Labour’ be included in the new party’s name otherwise “it would not be acceptable in Belfast”.

For their part Currie and Hume argued for the ‘social democratic’ element on the basis that it connected the new political entity to parties in Europe with a similar ideology.

“They both came to the conclusion that there could be a benefit in getting involved in the new party with the rest of us,” Mr Currie recalls.

“They were certainly in favour of the left-of-centre policy.”

During the spring of 1970 discussions about the formation of a new political party involving the six gathered pace, taking place mostly in the Donegal Gaeltacht, where respite from the growing instability across the border could be found.

With Fitt chosen as its leader, the party was officially launched at Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel on August 21 1970. Its ranks soon swelled.

“Paddy Wilson, who was a senator in Fitt’s party, had already joined us followed by a large number of the NDP (National Democratic Party) including Eddie McGrady, who later became chairman of the SDLP,” remembers Mr Currie.

“Reasonably quickly we got branches established and had our first annual conference.”

The party accepted that there’d be no change in the north’s constitutional status quo without majority consent.

“We then put the emphasis on bread and butter issues and particularly discrimination – most of us had been involved in the civil rights movement and we saw the SDLP as an extension of that."

Mr Currie says he and his new party colleagues were slick media operators by comparison to their unionist counterparts.

“We had a great advantage over unionists because we were so much better than them on television."

The SDLP’s political campaigning overlaid that of the civil rights movement and, Mr Currie believes, both achieved much in a relatively short time, starting with the first civil rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon on 24 August 1968, a time when “unionist rule was absolute at all levels of power - political, economic, judicial”.

“Neither constitutional nationalism nor violent republicanism had created the slightest dent in unionist control, and the sovereign government at Westminster remained content to allow the devolved government to rule in its own sectarian interest.

“Yet within six months of the beginning of the civil rights campaign, and coinciding with the formation of the SDLP, nearly all of its demands had been conceded.”

He cites British government political and military intervention in a region that had previously been ignored, the suspension of the Stormont parliament, and the subsequent establishment of power-sharing and north-south partnership through the Sunngingdale agreement.

“This was a major achievement considering what had happened for the previous 48 years.”