Anyone one read the recent piece about Bríd Rodgers in The Irish Times. I was amazed to discover she is 88. Surprising, for some reason, to think that she was in her early 60s when the GFA/BA was signed. That said as an SDLP politician her views are clearly shaped by that party's trajectory. For example she argues:
"John [Hume], when he stood down, said that our job is to make sure that our young people grow up in a different society – sectarian-free, democratic. It was to 'fulfil the untold promise of the Good Friday Agreement and build the new Ireland,'" she says.
"When I look back on it that was what the agreement was about. It was about building together in partnership. But I think the whole thing went pear-shaped after the St Andrews Agreement of 2006 when the leadership had moved from the committed parties who had taken all the risks, the UUP and the SDLP, to the DUP and Sinn Féin. I think then that reconciliation took a back seat.
"Tribalism suits the DUP and Sinn Féin better. I don't think they really believe in the principles of partnership. They work to their own separate agendas. As far as I am concerned there is nothing wrong with the agreement, although it has its flaws, it's the people now running the agreement."
Would that be the same UUP who had to be dragged to the negotiating table. Whose leader at that table had proceeded down the Gervaghy Road hand in hand with one Ian Paisley? And that was the non-tribalist party? I agree that the St. Andrew's Agreement was flawed, and yet, and yet, she ignores the fact that Sinn Féin had sat in the Executive from the first opportunity it could, had participated in the negotiations around the GFA/BA and had taken significant risks in doing so. One can discuss whether the risks it took were greater than those taken by the UUP or the SDLP (which is not to suggest that there were no risks to either of those parties). Moreover, and this is ignored completely, the Executive did not sit between 2002 and 2007 because the UUP sought the expulsion of Sinn Féin from it due to an alleged SF spy ring in the NIO. Where were the principles of partnership there?
There's a further point:
With groups such as Ireland's Future pushing for an expedited poll on a united Ireland she worries too about what she feels is a tendency towards nationalist "triumphalism".
"The more they talk of a united Ireland the more they make it difficult for unionists to engage. As Seamus Mallon said, it is about sharing, it is not about winning. I am afraid that the emphasis now is to make the unionists see: 'You are screwed no matter what happens, so we are going to go ahead and there is going to be a united Ireland whether you like it or not.' I think that is the attitude. And I don't like it. I prefer Micheál Martin's talk of a shared island," she says.
That's fine as far as it goes, but it does raise the question as to why she was involved at the highest levels inside an avowedly nationalist political party that sought, and still does, a United Ireland, at least on paper? She rightly lauds John Hume's approach. She says:
She is quietly proud of what she achieved in politics and prouder still that it was the SDLP, despite its slump in nationalist support, who created the architecture and spearheaded the drive for a peaceful route away from violence and into powersharing politics. The template remains, she says, with John Hume who persuaded her back into cutting-edge politics. "John's idea of a new Ireland is what we should be looking at."
But it was Hume who saw the necessity of talking to Sinn Féin and Republicans in order to bring around an entirely changed circumstance. And the Agreement that he, and she, signed up to was one that made the expression, and as importantly the right to seek, a United Ireland an entirely legitimate political proposition - as legitimate as that which seeks to retain the Union.
So often in reading thoughts like hers I feel that somehow the implications of Hume's approach was never fully internalised by those around him, though I've little doubt that he realised exactly what a possible outcome might be for the SDLP. And while it is easy in hindsight to see that Sinn Féin's current prominence in the southern polity was far from guaranteed, it's not so difficult to see how there were already clues as to that trajectory with regard to the North. One basic problem for the SDLP was that it was a regional party whereas SF offered at least some prospect for all-island activism. A little regarded aspect of the story of the peace process is how rapidly US politicians recognised in Sinn Féin something that they clearly did not in the SDLP. Worth engaging with that further I suspect.
All that said where and when it counted in 1998 she and Hume and the SDLP were key to cementing the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. That's no small thing.
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