Gerry Fitt, who died yesterday aged 79 as Lord Fitt of Bell's Hill, made a significant contribution to politics and the slow march towards peace on this island. He was the first leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Northern Ireland was a very different place when he began his political career in the 1950s. Over 30 years of almost unchallenged unionist rule since partition produced a society that was sterile politically, sectarian, and devoid of oversight by the government in London.
Gerry Fitt emerged on to this landscape in 1958 as a Belfast city councillor, a committed socialist championing the cause of industrial labour. His socialism impelled him to put class politics ahead of nationalism, but such was the reality in Northern Ireland then that he was unable to escape the politics of sectarianism. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the civil rights movement because of his commitment to equality and fair play for all. That placed him on the nationalist side of the divide in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. He marched for civil rights (and in 1968 was famously bludgeoned by the police in Derry). But, he was a trenchant opponent of violence.
He won a seat in Westminster from a unionist in 1966 and was an instant hate figure for many in that party. As an MP, he succeeded in breaking the convention that Northern Ireland affairs were not discussed in the House of Commons. Because of this, and the agitation for civil rights to which he was central, Gerry Fitt pushed knowledge of the injustices within Northern Ireland on to a wider stage.
He was a founder-member of the SDLP in the early 1970s along with John Hume, Paddy Devlin, Austin Currie and Paddy O'Hanlon. It is a measure of his political stature that he became the SDLP's first leader. He was one of the architects of the Sunningdale Agreement, which established the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive, destroyed by loyalist opposition in 1974. It is instructive to Fitt's legacy that the Belfast Agreement has been dubbed "Sunningdale for slow learners". In 1983, he lost his Westminster seat to Gerry Adams and he was appointed a peer the following year.
Gerry Fitt stood for democracy, fairness and political decency. He earned the admiration of many in the unionist community and the hatred of many republicans with the poisonous chant "Fitt's a Brit". But he never advocated killing his opponents and he never supported burning people out of their homes. He played a leading role in some of Northern Ireland's most difficult years.