Damaged, diminished and dazed following a brutal election last month, the SDLP is finally facing the new reality. ... The world does not owe any party a living, no matter how valiant it has been, writes Dan Keenan.
November 26th confirmed to a party, firmly convinced of its own merits and electoral capacity, that the world does not owe any party a living, no matter how valiant it has been.
Its party conference, once scheduled for November, is now fixed for late February and will feature an election for deputy leader. Bríd Rodgers, elected two years ago when Mark Durkan succeeded John Hume, is standing down.
The race to succeed her will demonstrate if the SDLP is serious about squaring up to the challenge posed by Sinn Féin.
So far two candidates have confirmed to The Irish Times their intention to stand and have begun soundings.
A third has done everything but confirm, and was happy to be interviewed, despite saying a little more time was needed before any announcement.
Mr Alban Maginness, the party's sole assembly representative in North Belfast and the city's first Catholic lord mayor, like rival Dr Alasdair McDonnell and the as-yet-unconfirmed Ms Patricia Lewsley, insist the party is far from finished.
Mr Maginness talks of the party's "historic mission" which is to do more than bring about peace and stability. He talks of "the ultimate prize of reconciliation" between the two political communities.
"Some people talk of the SDLP that brought peace to Northern Ireland," he says. "As if that was its function. Certainly we did bring about peace, but remember this party was formed prior to any IRA campaign. It was formed not to bring about peace per se but rather to bring about equality and justice and, above all, reconciliation between the two traditions. That task is yet to be fulfilled."
"We are a bit bruised and battered, " says Ms Lewsley, "but we are now more focused".
Recently returned as assembly member for Lagan Valley, she rejects talk that the SDLP is a one-generation party. "We'll be around for the next generation to come. People have got to understand that the party is bigger than Hume, Mallon and McGrady. Maybe that was part of our problem," she adds.
"Since Mark has taken over many more of us have been given a profile in the public eye, and people are seeing a different face of the SDLP."
Like Mr Maginness, she looks at the party's current passive membership and sees a need to encourage new activists to join. Citing Sinn Féin's ability to put many workers around the doors during November, she says: "I can't compete with that".
For Dr McDonnell the challenges ahead are wider than the threat posed by Sinn Féin.
"The challenges are to organise and restructure the SDLP for the 21st century. As a party we have done massive work over the past 30 years. But the demands of the new century are very different from the past century," he says.
These centre on public expectation. "People want to know not what you did for them yesterday but what you are going to do for them tomorrow," he says.
He adds: "The [party's] achievements to date cannot be understated because they transformed our society. But I think people have great expectations which have evolved on the back of the Good Friday agreement, and some of them exceed anyone's capacity to deliver, not just the SDLP's."
Like Mr Maginness and Ms Lewley he dismisses what many commentators see as the current inexorable trend in favour of Sinn Féin.
"The Sinn Féin machine is not unstoppable," the South Belfast GP maintains. "I think Sinn Féin is exploiting genuine hopes and desires of people, but there are too many contradictions within the party. There is a dichotomy in there, and there is still a lot of brutality out there orchestrated by and perpetrated by the Provos," he alleges.
"We still have a lot of fear in our society, and those things don't sit easily alongside some of the higher, loftier aspirations that are floated [by Sinn Féin]."
All three potential deputy leaders agree party organisation needs to be improved.
"The party is in a position to organise itself, to be organised," says Dr McDonnell. "There are a lot of people out there, and it's a question of focusing them and deciding what has to be done.
"The party as I know it is crying out for personal contact with the senior membership. The rank-and-file want to discuss all the issues of the day with senior members, and a discussion has to start within the party. We need to organise the party membership around our values and our structures."
None of the three criticises the election campaign wholesale. This is despite the fact that many outside the SDLP held up to ridicule its slogan of "Stop the DUP" in an election which handed that party an extra 50 per cent in its assembly seat total.
Mr Maginness says only that the campaign seemed not to be in tune with the mood of the nationalist electorate and failed to mobilise the SDLP-leaning voters.
Ms Lewsley claims the campaign for pro-agreement party transfers helped her retain her assembly seat, but admits that it failed to bring out the core SDLP vote. Dr McDonnell says the party fell victim to Murphy's law and that everything that could go wrong went wrong. "There was a dislocation between what we were trying to get across and what the man in the street was looking for," he says.
Like the others, Dr McDonnell claims SDLP voters did not see the point of an election to a suspended Assembly. Sinn Féin was motivated to become the largest nationalist party and the DUP used the election as a referendum against the UUP. SDLP voters had no such driving force.
There is unanimity over the leadership of Mark Durkan. "I see no other option," says Dr McDonnell. "No equivocation. He definitely should be leader," says Ms Lewsley. "I wouldn't be surprised if there are murmurings after an election like that," admits Mr Maginness. "But if I felt he had to go I would say so."