The mantra John Hume quoted from his father took the SDLP a long way. You can’t eat a flag, said Sam Hume.
His son used it to warn and encourage nationalists clamped down by unionism, deserted by the state across the border - while their republican siblings set about wrecking the place in the name of a dream Ireland. It is true that there is no eating in flags but a considerable number like a good chew on them.
It’s ‘a rally for a united Ireland’ said Alliance, explaining with a touch of frost why their leader Naomi Long would not be telling the latest Ireland’s Future audience, last Saturday in Dublin, what she thinks about Ireland’s future. Hell no, Alliance won’t go. It isn’t difficult to see why. Long time enemies and some observers who avoid bile agree that what Alliance fear most is losing the former unionist voters they have won, and discouraging others.
New voters, non-voters, the determinedly un-party political? No party is going to spell out what they suspect is their appeal to the non-political. Alliance have always specialised in attracting people who think politics is fairly disgusting. Northern Ireland dwellers, in other words, who flinch at being asked are they unionist or nationalist, Catholic or Protestant, probably even flinch as they fill in census forms where nobody can see what boxes they tick.
Lately the pose as proud agnostics - more than a pose for most if not all of its elected representatives - has become cool. Easy to scoff for politics-watchers; professional scoffers, the breed called commentators and ‘nerds’ by some of the nerdy themselves. They, we, forget that we are the oddities. Polls reliably suggest that most people only start thinking on polling day ‘who am I going to vote for? Will I bother?’
It has been easy to mock Alliance as prissy, snobbish. Harder now to debunk their younger front-people. Never easy to downgrade Naomi Long’s articulacy, determination, valour against awful health challenges. As a leader she sets a tone hard to fault, and probably very effective at hooking in the novice voter.
The people Alliance are happy to stay well away from come in two guises, both unpleasant to many. Sinn Féin and DUP back-catalogues are full of certainty; in the past justification on the one side for atrocities, plain bigotry on the other plus ambivalence about violence.
As Alliance’s vote has grown they have taken flak from both sides, more and most aggressively in recent times from unionism, threats from loyalists, offices burnt. Nationalist dislike is more disguised. Sinn Féin in public now minds its manners. The days of setting fire to SDLP offices and leaving pipe bombs at the doors of people who supported the emergence of the PSNI before SF belatedly got around to it; also long gone, not to be mentioned.
The most striking image recycled lately from the time of the last border poll showed a young Bob Cooper viewing newspaper posters, Alliance deputy leader and already in his second political incarnation. His third would be as front-man over decades for fair employment legislation, his first as a Young Unionist in Queen’s University. Cooper took more hostility from his own community as fair employment chief than any Alliance leader until David Ford on same sex marriage, and Long on flags. Hostility from family and friends to Lundies, the type Susan McKay has championed and explained so perfectly, is a stress too many nationalists ignore. Not that it would be said in public but Cooper’s ‘mixed’ marriage was top of the chronological charge sheet.
Can Alliance hold their nerve? A party at the core of a 3rd minority will have soul-searching to do. They may simply insist with some clout on more information, more debate. Or else? Like the citizens in the existing republic who fear bristling northerners, and the bill, the centre’s agnostics might forever block a majority for unification.
