FROM THE FLOOR:EVERY PARTY conference is run for a specific purpose, and every one therefore has a mood all of its own. This SDLP conference was no different. Party handlers were initially worried that organising two SDLP conferences in 10 months, with all its attendant costs and a £50 (€57) bill for the conference dinner, might be a mistake – especially in a recession.
But they also felt there was, and remains, a pressing need for this party, with its new leader, to reinvigorate itself ahead of two crucial elections next May.
On the evidence of the weekend they need not have worried. The delegates turned out to hear Margaret Ritchie make herself perfectly clear on a few issues.
She insisted there is no blurring of the clear distinctions between them and Sinn Féin and there would be no early rush to merge with any of the main southern parties. There has always been a small but detectable strain of opinion within the SDLP that its work was pretty much concluded on Good Friday 1998 and there remained little still to achieve.
It was never a majority view, and it seems even more in the minority now. Assembly arithmetic dictates that the SDLP now stands on a pivotal point and the party’s fortunes could tip either way. Many delegates have long wondered how, after spending the past 40 years doing the “right thing” they have been rewarded with electoral decline. This conference seemed to indicate they have had enough of that. And so there was much thoughtful discussion about the future of nationalism, the prospects for Irish unity and what it could all mean.
Senior figures from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour all shared the same platform without once, mercifully, venturing onto the desperate territory of the State’s finances and who is to blame. There were also some signs of the creeping normality of politics that has flowed almost imperceptibly from the new politics post-Belfast Agreement.
Presbyterian Moderator Norman Hamilton was there to discuss proposals to tackle sectarianism and division while Irish Timescolumnist David Adams, once a member of the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party joined a panel discussion on Irish unity. Twenty years ago that would have been impossible – not because either would not have wanted to attend, or because the party would not have wanted them. Rather there simply wasn't the political space, at least in public, for it to happen.