The passing of Paddy O'Hanlon illustrates how much the political landscape of Northern Ireland has changed, writes FIONNUALA O'CONNOR.
CHANGE IN the North is often belittled by irredentist republicans on one side and unreconstructed unionists on the other. Even the most grudging acknowledged the powerful sight of Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness either side of Sir Hugh Orde lambasting dissident republicans.
The tragedy was that it took three violent deaths to line up the two politicians with the policeman. But there they were, symbols of a new Northern Ireland. McGuinness and dissidents calling each other traitors merely increased the impact.
Paddy O’Hanlon, who died last week, came out of the old Northern Ireland – a constitutional republican whose father was an IRA man of the 1920s. He entered a political world that has now gone.
As a founder of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, he was part of the hurtling energy of protest that hustled it away. A man with a grand rhetorical manner, the voice of a street preacher and a big, rackety laugh, he belonged to a period when the SDLP had political clout but no power.
When O’Hanlon died just short of his 65th birthday, he had spent twice as long out of active politics as in it – the experience of a sizeable number of Northerners, some better adjusted than others.
A late-flowering, high-earning legal career still could not outshine the early period, when life was full of the horror of the Troubles, but also the excitement of ending old assumptions about Catholic helplessness in the face of a seemingly permanent Protestant majority.
John Hume, Gerry Fitt, Austin Currie, Paddy Devlin, Ivan Cooper, O’Hanlon and Paddy Wilson – knifed to death by loyalist paramilitaries within two years of the party’s formation – were a logical spin-off from the civil rights movement but above all individualists.
They showed up unionists in debate and brushed aside the old Nationalist Party. Strengthened by early recruits, they had to sustain themselves through decades of more setbacks than advances, with a worthwhile local forum only during the short-lived powersharing of 1974.
O’Hanlon loved electioneering, but in the end the polls rejected him. One of the youngest founder-members and a Stormont MP at 24, he had left politics well before the SDLP’s decline set hard. The wonder is not that the party is so diminished, but that it has lasted so long.
It survived on unsung campaigners and organisers, and the sacrifices made by families and spouses as leading figures took the argument to Dublin, London, Washington and in the case of Hume, around the world.
Many more shared the anger that fired O’Hanlon and the others who formed the SDLP, the frustration and sense of injustice that fuelled the civil rights movement. Only a fraction marched or organised. Fear kept many inactive – fear of being identified, losing jobs, of loyalist attack. It was sometimes disguised as cynicism: what good would marching do? Or worse: the most articulate were out for themselves. There were few perks for most in the SDLP over many years.
It took huge self-belief to reformulate the demands of a largely passive community in the late 1960s, work begun pre-SDLP. It took more again to combat the damage by those who turned to violence – to their own people, to relations with the larger Protestant community and the Republic, and the aim of uniting Ireland that the SDLP and republicans shared.
Apart from a moment of panic in August 1969, O’Hanlon spent his time in politics arguing that the gun was not the answer. He had been an independent Stormont MP for only a few months when Belfast exploded. His patch was south Armagh. But when seven people were killed in two days, six of them Catholic, he drove to Dublin with two other independents, Paddy Devlin and Paddy Kennedy, to plead that Catholics under attack from loyalists along the Falls Road needed guns for defence. They saw a senior government official, who refused them.
Rumoured for years, the story was finally confirmed by published government documents in 2000. O’Hanlon said he never regretted it because the Falls was in danger of being overrun by loyalists and the part-time police militia, the B Specials, and the guns would be purely defensive. August 1969 in Belfast left a lot of people who tried later to counter IRA influence in the Catholic community wondering how they would have behaved if their homes had been in Bombay Street, burned to the ground. Even much later, Hume often said that the Provisional IRA was born in the ashes of Bombay Street.
Hume and company had loyal votes, Dublin and the Catholic Church supported their arguments, but IRA bombs and bullets got the headlines. A bright young generation became middle-aged. The slow learners, a classic Séamus Mallon put-down of Sinn Féin, became model students in the end. The SDLP barons and buccaneers had left only shadowy party structures to confront them. But Paddy O’Hanlon was a fine buccaneer.