Tag: Colum Eastwood

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” . 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. 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. One of the reasons the SDLP’s first leader, Gerry Fitt – who insisted on the inclusion of the word Labour in its title– parted ways with the party in 1979 was because he believed it had become too “republican” and he regarded himself as representing the “voice of concern”. A divided SDLP is now, it seems, a political flower withered beyond recovery, but the scattering of its petals is just one manifestation of weakened northern political muscle. Sinn Féin has also struggled in recent times to carve out a distinct space in the Brexit drama and has been left reacting rather than initiating. But the complaints of SF are also a reminder of a wider recklessness and lack of leadership in NI of which SF bears part responsibility at the very time when that leadership is needed most.

Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, resigned in protest and subsequent elections saw his Irish nationalists Sinn Fein party almost win power. As the UK government's ranking official on issues related to Northern Ireland, Bradley has been tasked with leading the efforts to restore power-sharing to the region. On Friday, politicians in Northern Ireland reacted with dismay to Bradley's published remarks, accusing her of adding to the troubled atmosphere of the region's politics. "We are not surprised that a British government minister did not understand the intricacies of politics here in the North," Colum Eastwood, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, told Al Jazeera. "The British and Irish governments, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, need to meet urgently to agree a package of legislation to get Stormont back up and running. Border concerns The implementation of 1998's Good Friday Agreement requires cooperation from the British and Irish governments. This week, the Irish government announced they would seek a separate agreement with the European Union on the status of the border to avoid further delay in agreeing its form. In the case of a "hard Brexit", no agreement would be reached and a presumptive "hard border" would return - along with checkpoints, as was effectively the case throughout the Troubles from the 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement 20 years ago, and vastly increased waiting times for cross-border trade. In Northern Ireland the issue of amnesty for the Troubles is a controversial one: bloodshed was not one-sided and the legacy of violence is inherently complex. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.