THE SOCIAL Democratic and Labour Party was a rare example of self-interest being subordinated to the national interest, former minister and SDLP founder member Austin Currie said in Dublin last night.
Speaking at the publication of The SDLP: The Struggle for Agreement in Northern Ireland, 1970-2000 by his party colleague Seán Farren, also a former minister, Mr Currie said history was being rewritten in order to downplay the party’s peacemaking role.
Leading SDLP figures in attendance at the launch in the European Parliament office included former deputy leader and deputy first minister Séamus Mallon; former Northern agriculture minister Bríd Rodgers; Denis Haughey and Hugh Logue. Also present were Labour leader Eamon Gilmore and party education spokesman Ruairí Quinn, along with Fianna Fáil TD for Donegal North East Niall Blaney.
Mr Currie said the historical truth was that Northern Ireland had stood on a precipice during the Troubles, with “madmen from both sides” seeking to push the population over the cliff, and that the SDLP had formed “a thin line” of defence against such efforts.
The book was a study of “remarkable achievement” by a party that was in government for only five months in its first 29 years of existence but whose members played a leading role in the civil rights movement that ended 50 years of unionist hegemony in the North.
It was a “tragedy” that the 1974 powersharing executive set up under the Sunningdale Agreement was brought down by violence.