Social Democratic and Labour Party - Aims

Aims

There is a debate over the intentions of the party's founders, with some now claiming that the aim was to provide a political movement to unite constitutional nationalists who opposed the paramilitary campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and wished to campaign for civil rights for Catholics and a united Ireland by peaceful, constitutional means. However, others argue that, as the name implies, the emphasis was originally on creating a social-democratic party rather than a nationalist party. This debate between social democracy and nationalism was to persist for the first decade of the party's existence. Founder and first leader Gerry Fitt — a former leader of the explicitly socialist Republican Labour Party — would later claim that it was the party's decision to demand a Council of Ireland as part of the Sunningdale Agreement that signified the point at which the party adopted a clear nationalist agenda. He would later leave the party in 1979, claiming that it was no longer the party it was intended to be.

However the party itself argues that its earliest publications show they have remained consistent in their search for a way out of an impasse in Northern Ireland that satisfies nationalist desires and calms unionist fears. The SDLP were the first to advocate the so-called principle of consent — recognising that fundamental changes in Northern Ireland's constitutional status could only come with the agreement of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. However, the SDLP has always been clear that this should not mean that anybody should have a veto on change or equality.

For most of its existence Sinn Féin ridiculed the principle of consent. However, they grudgingly agreed to it when signing up to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The principle of consent, also widely accepted by unionists, was explicitly endorsed by a large majority of Irish people in referendums (held on the same day) that endorsed the agreement.

Whilst anxious to achieve devolved government in Northern Ireland (which the British Government had prorogued in 1972), the SDLP were also insistent on what was then known as the Irish dimension — in other words a defined constitutional role for the Republic in northern affairs. This issue led to Gerry Fitt's decision to leave in 1979. Mr Fitt had agreed to enter into talks with Humphrey Atkins, the Secretary of State, which excluded an Irish dimension but was then rebuffed by his party conference.

John Hume was an advocate of a joint authority approach where both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom would exercise political power. This was a central idea of the New Ireland Forum which brought together mainstream Irish parties in the 1980s. However, this was rejected out-of-hand by Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, in a speech that became known as "out, out, out" because she dismissed every proposal of the forum by saying "that is out".

The horrified reaction of the Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to this speech and the electoral success of Sinn Féin following the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike shocked the Thatcher Government and they were receptive to FitzGerald's lobbying on behalf of the SDLP which eventually led in 1985 to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which was opposed by both unionists and republicans. Republicans were concerned that the agreement did not go far enough. Unionists staged a demonstration of some 200,000 people in Belfast city centre.

While the SDLP's opponents claimed the party had become "post-nationalist" (following a speech where John Hume referred to "an increasingly post-nationalist Europe") after the Good Friday Agreement, Mark Durkan has recently described the party as republican. Durkan often emphasises to unionists that the protections and constitutional mechanisms of the Good Friday Agreement would remain in the united Ireland that the SDLP seeks.