SDLP conference preview: Mark Durkan must feel he has had it tough as a party leader. The man who served one of the longest political apprenticeships - arguably he has been John Hume's favoured one since 1983 - has also endured one of the most protracted leadership transfers. Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor, reports.
This weekend, however, in Derry, as the SDLP faithful gather in what many see as the party's political capital, Mr Durkan must make the troubled party his own, as if there never had been a Hume or a Mallon.
For the 44-year-old leader it is a crucial time both for the SDLP and for the Belfast Agreement. The fortunes of both are inextricably linked and the battle is on to save both.
Mr Durkan sees the mission ahead, both for the weekend and for the expected election in May, in the grandest of terms.
"The future that the Irish people chose when they voted for the agreement wasn't the future marked by serial choreographed failures, blame game, with suspension and phoney process," he says.
He is frustrated by the transplanting of so much disappointment onto the body of hope that flowed from Good Friday 1998, just as he is angered at what he calls "the privatisation" of the agreement to republicans and whichever happens to be the lead unionist party.
Working the agreement and fulfilling its potential were the processes by which all other outstanding problems were to be addressed, he says, and it hasn't happened because of the "problem parties".
With that in mind, the SDLP squares itself for its annual jamboree, which promises to be more of a rallying cry than any in recent years.
From the party perspective, the Belfast Agreement is their agreement, founded on a bedrock of Hume-ism and fought for over three turbulent decades. They're damned if they're going to lie down now before the Shinners or merge and become the northern wing of a southern party.
Whether the party is in a fit state to fight the fight is, of course, another question, no matter how great the motivation.
Mr Durkan has little option but to take on Mitchel McLaughlin, the Sinn Féin chairman, for Hume's Foyle seat, a battle he has to win for his and the party's sake. Eddie McGrady feels he has little option but to fight Caitriona Ruane to retain the South Down prize it took him four elections to win.
And so it is repeated across the North, not just in the expected May Westminster election, but in the local elections scheduled, it seems, for the same date. The party has 116 council seats - each of them will be a mini-Foyle.
But, as Mr Durkan easily concedes, mood does not equal momentum. If it did then the SDLP would sweep all before it. In reality it is fighting - yet again - for survival with a smaller, older and more fatigued base than Sinn Féin.
"You have to create your own momentum by presence, profile and appeal," Mr Durkan insists. The objective? For the SDLP to hold its own - not just for its own sake - and for its supporters to give the agreement the biggest shot in the arm.
For Mr Durkan, this conference, these elections, this political career, are all about one thing. It's the agreement, stupid.
Anything that departs from its script, which may as well have been penned in Durkan blood, is asking for trouble. The accord is not a tactic, it's a principle and a guiding one at that.
He accuses republicans of placing party-building above political process-building.
"I believe people are starting to realise that there is more to suggest that Sinn Féin is interested in a permanent peace process in which they can be the stars because they are in an exclusive position vis-à-vis the IRA, rather than delivering the agreement on straightforward terms." Therein lies the biggest clue as to how the electoral war between now and May will be portrayed by the SDLP.
For Durkan, it's time to market the differences. The differences between the democrats and constitutionalists on the one hand and those wedded to armed struggle on the other.