Madam, - It seems that Fianna Fáil is interested in merging with the SDLP now that the latter's fortunes have gone down a little. But a glance at the history of both parties reveals a few home truths.
Fianna Fáil was founded out of violence and Sinn Féin and was inspired by Padraig Pearse, Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass and other men of 1916. The SDLP was specifically founded as a party of non-violence inspired by leaders such as Daniel O'Connell, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and John Hume. The origins of the two parties are worlds apart in that respect.
Fianna Fáil was also the dominant party of a State that virtually ignored the plight of Northern Catholics. That hasn't been forgotten. Nor do peaceful nationalists forget that FF leaders allegedly supplied weapons that helped found the Provisional IRA, making a bad situation intolerable and leading to the monster that FF is itself now trying to outmanoeuvre: Sinn Féin.
SDLP people also cannot forget that FF rejected the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, bolstering the Sinn Féin position and undermining the SDLP.
SDLP supporters want a united Ireland by consent because they have a genuine love for all of the Irish people and would not want to allow Northern violence to spread over the whole island. FF has come relatively recently to the view that consent is preferable, and in the recent past has argued in favour of the "inalienable right" of the Irish people to national self-determination.
The SDLP is acknowledged as the architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which FF helped achieve, but contrary to its usual policy on the North. (It wasn't just Sinn Féin which did U-turns). The SDLP is also by instinct a high-tax, high-spend, squeaky clean ethical party of social conscience that puts human beings first in contrast to FF's low-tax (in recent years anyway), low-spend, corruption-tarnished, state-nationalism-oriented populist world view that seems to honour big business.
But to end on a positive note, I think we may be worlds apart but, if the will is there, it shouldn't be too difficult for FF to change enough to become worthy partners in the true social democratic party that Ireland has been crying out for. - Yours, etc,
JOHN O'CONNELL, Maybrook Park, Derry.