Some years back thoughts of a merger with Sinn Féin were unthinkable but maybe times have changed
WHEN NORTH Antrim MLA Declan O’Loan withdrew the call he had made only two hours earlier for a single Northern nationalist party, an SDLP spokesman told doyen of Northern political tweeters Eamonn Mallie, “Very small earthquake. Not many killed”.
But O’Loan did not recant. The brief withdrawal statement merely noted that his call – for a “major realignment of Northern nationalism” – contradicted party policy.
Off he goes into the Stormont wilderness, at least until the summer break at the end of June. The still new party leader flew back from a new-MP session at Westminster to make her disciplinary ruling in person, though O’Loan had withdrawn his call the day before after furious exchanges in the Stormont corridors.
Margaret Ritchie had little option, having made a public virtue of refusing any form of election pact with Sinn Féin, in keeping with SDLP policy for decades.
A splash from North Antrim is part of the backwash. O’Loan may have sounded intent on career-suicide in Stormont, but the notion of realignment was not a solo run. He is as far as possible from being a longtime sneaking regarder of Sinn Féin: a category that would fit few SDLP elected representatives. An unlikely stirrer of rebellion, he has been known to speak out of turn, as one of the first to say that the party should be represented on the Policing Board. A lifetime teacher with a slight dash of pedantry, he is married to the much better-known Nuala, former police ombudsman and incisive lawyer who famously reduced a chief constable to a state of emotional idiocy on live television. She is now a dame of the British empire.
As a couple, they have lived out a commitment to public service, sometimes painfully. Dame Nuala had a miscarriage after being caught in an IRA bombing, and drew much unionist abuse for investigating and finding police misconduct. A student son was beaten up by loyalists in Belfast. Declan O’Loan trod a delicate line as local SDLP councillor during the lengthy loyalist picket of Masses at the Harryville Catholic church in their homeplace of Ballymena, as he tried to criticise the picket without provoking worse attacks. It is an approach Sinn Féin mocks as appeasement, though they have no better ideas on how to deal with anti-Catholicism.
O’Loan came to Stormont to make his original statement on Monday, after a supportive meeting in his constituency. Several local members, including two councillors, have said they agree with him. Realignment inside unionism has been much discussed, if not to much purpose, since defeat for both the UU and DUP leaders at the polls on May 6th. By contrast any question of nationalist realignment had been swept off the table in advance by the Ritchie leadership, though most assessments saw no yearning for closer ties with Sinn Féin in any case.
But the doorsteps may have said otherwise. Nationalists in the Paisley baronetcy of North Antrim have done their electoral duty with doggedness down the years, though the era of Paisley rabble-rousing has mellowed with age and and the passing of the baton to his son. The nationalist share of the vote has never made it to 30 per cent. The SDLP took 17 per cent nine years ago to Sinn Féin’s 10 per cent, before the republican rise took off. On May 6th Sinn Féin’s Dáithi McKay won 12.4 per cent to O’Loan’s 8.8 per cent. Without an improvement, O’Loan will struggle to hold his Stormont seat next year. In 2007 he made it thanks to Sinn Féin transfers on the last count.
Intra-nationalist needle in North Antrim about “splitting the vote” is very unlike Fermanagh-South Tyrone, almost evenly balanced between Catholics and Protestants, where a Ritchie new-broom celebrity candidate almost cost Sinn Féin’s Agriculture Minister Michelle Gildernew her seat, and the SDLP vote halved. In South Down Ritchie held the seat for the SDLP with the help of unionist votes, as did Alasdair McDonnell in South Belfast.
O’Loan may have been alluding to that shake-out in different constituencies when he said, straight after calling for his major realignment, that the SDLP’s “ability to command respect and at least second preference votes across the whole community” should not be lost.
The aftermath of his lunge at policymaking should be revealing. He is not the only anxious MLA, questioning party direction and even existence. The IRA is gone. Constitutional Sinn Féin has yet to convince the battle-scarred SDLP. Proposing amalgamation with their bitterest enemy still sounds like desperation. The party was set up to counter violent republicanism.
A few years back merging with Sinn Féin was unmentionable, when an insider saw the choices as a merger with Fianna Fáil or Labour, or to simply shut up shop. SDLP voters would have a viable option. “The Shinners are now the Stickies, so why not?”