Northern nationalists look to be locked outside the gates of power
The SDLP is now scattered to the four winds. Its leader, Colum Eastwood joined Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin on stage at FF’s ardfheis last month, while former leader Mark Durkan raised some eyebrows by being unveiled during the week as a Fine Gael candidate for the Dublin constituency in the European Elections to represent, not Dublin, but Derry.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has suggested Durkan’s candidacy under the FG banner is partly about delivering on his promise of December 2017 that northern nationalists “will never again be left behind by an Irish government” .
Varadkar’s claim might be taken with a grain of salt given that Durkan’s candidacy is likely to be as much about stealing a march on FF as it is about the welfare of northern nationalists. Are current and former SDLP members merely useful pawns in southern political one-upmanship?
As the Labour Party sees it, there is another dimension to this. It is not a receptacle for the SDLP exiles, despite the Labour dimension to its title. Labour’s Dublin candidate in the European elections, Alex White, has insisted: “The saddest aspect of it all is the fact that, having worked within the Party of European Socialists throughout his career, Mark Durkan has now signed up to the conservative European People’s Party – a group that offers a very different vision for Europe than the Party of European Socialists. As we look forward to these elections, it is clear that the true candidate for social democracy – for a social democratic and labour party – will not be the Fine Gael candidate, nor indeed the Fianna Fáil candidate, despite their recent alliance with the SDLP. It will be the Labour candidate.”
In truth, however, the “Labour” dimension to the SDLP has been problematic for decades. One of the reasons the SDLP’s first leader, Gerry Fitt…
