Seamus Mallon: Tony Blair said to me, ‘The trouble with you fellows is you have no guns’

One of Northern Ireland's most prominent nationalist politicians, Seamus Mallon was at the heart of the Social Democratic and Labour Party for three decades.

A member of the power-sharing Sunningdale Executive from 1973 to 1974, he was deputy leader of the party from 1979 to 2001, and was the SDLP spokesman on policing and justice, as well as MP for Newry and Armagh from 1983 to 2005.

The SDLP's chief negotiator in the talks leading up to the signing of the Belfast Agreement, he was Northern Ireland's deputy first minister from 1998 to 2001.

A Catholic from the predominantly Protestant village of Markethill, in south Co Armagh, Mallon was known for speaking out ceaselessly against violence from all quarters – republican, loyalist and that of state forces – even during the worst days of the Troubles, and suffered threats, intimidation and physical attacks towards himself, his family and his home.

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A Shared Home Place review: A first-hand view of NI history

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In his memoir, A Shared Home Place, just published, he reflects on his relationship with his former party leader John Hume, and his concerns about Hume's talks with Gerry Adams, of Sinn Féin, and the missed opportunity of Sunningdale. He also calls for a new beginning: "A shared home place in which Irish unity can only be achieved through parallel consent."

I WAS ONE of the organisers of a civil rights march in Armagh in November 1968. Supporters of Ian Paisley – the founder a few years later of the Democratic Unionist Party – were staked out around the town, all of them with cudgels of some kind; it was said that they had broken into a local hardware shop to help themselves to pickaxe handles and other implements.

As we marched along Ogle Street we saw the armed Paisleyites blocking the street ahead; at a certain point the police told us we would not be allowed to go any further.

There were some angry speeches, which did not help when we were trying to get people away to safety. There were a few cracked heads before it ended. It was frightening: for the first time in my life I saw close-up the awful snarl of sectarian hatred on the faces of those people, people I knew and met every day of the week.

At the start I had absolutely no desire or inclination to be a politician. I was perfectly happy with what I was doing. But I felt I had no choice but to do what I did

In May 1973 a local election with new, more democratic structures was about to take place. The SDLP in this area had a good candidate, a well-known farmer from Tassagh. On nomination day I came home from school and my wife, Gertrude, said the farmer had phoned to say he was pulling out. The deadline for nominations was 5pm in Armagh city.

In a panic I rang three or four people, asking them to stand. I then realised that if I didn’t do it myself we would miss the deadline. I called into the council offices to get the nomination form, and found the requisite number of people in Armagh to sign it for me.

I then discovered I needed a deposit of £25, no small sum in those days. I went into a shop where I knew the owner and said, “Could you lend me £25? I’ll not tell you now what it’s for, and I’ll let you have it back tomorrow.”

That was the beginning of a 32-year-old treadmill of politics for me. In those days I had absolutely no desire or inclination to be a politician. I was perfectly happy with what I was doing. But I felt I had no choice but to do what I did.

THE PERIOD FROM the early 1970s to the mid-1980s was a very harrowing one in Co Armagh, and there were times I believed we were on the brink of actual civil war.

I had a good friend, Denis Mullen, who was active in the SDLP. Denis was the first Catholic to be employed as an ambulance man in the South Tyrone Hospital in Dungannon, and had just been appointed head of the ambulance service there. He was having a house built outside the village of Moy.

I was driving through Armagh one evening, and somehow my radio tuned to the police radio’s wavelength; I heard there was a shooting in a particular townland in Moy. I said to myself, “That’s Dinny’s place.”

So I drove on out to the house, and Denis was lying there dead, and his wee three-year-old daughter was sitting beside him in her nightdress. That image of Denis lying dead beside his tiny daughter will stay with me for as long as I live on this earth.

EARLY ON I MADE a promise to myself that I would show my abhorrence at political and sectarian violence by visiting the homes of the bereaved – all the bereaved, whatever their background – and if at all possible pay my respects by attending the funerals of everybody who was killed by such violence in my constituency.

It was my statement to the IRA and to the loyalist paramilitaries, but it was often a difficult thing to do.

I shall never forget walking up the street in Bessbrook on my own to the funeral of one of the victims of the Kingsmill massacre. The constant drizzle and a dank grey mist added to the pall of grief that seemed to envelop the silent, heartbroken village. I felt desperately alone as a nationalist politician among those grieving unionists; I could hear my own footsteps.

I WAS ELECTED to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in June 1973, and in December the Sunningdale Agreement was signed, paving the way for the first power-sharing executive to be formed. As a new young party the feeling in the SDLP was one of hope, yet as I drove around Edward Carson's statue in front of the Stormont parliament building part of me was saying, "What am I doing here?"

I will never forget the day that the executive fell on May 28th, 1974, brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Council strike. It could be said that the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries were both responsible for bringing down the Sunningdale experiment. I would put more blame on the IRA, who understood politics better.

For the first time you had an Irish government involved in the solution of the Northern problem. For the first time you had an all-island Council of Ireland with executive functions. For the first time you had political representatives of the nationalist community involved in the Northern executive. And for the first time you had a unionist leadership that showed great courage and vision both in their negotiations to set up and then their practice in implementing a power-sharing administration.

The collapse of Sunningdale was one of the factors that tipped those people towards the IRA and Sinn Féin. Power-sharing and Sunningdale, had they survived, could have saved several thousand lives, particularly of young people, in the remaining years of the Troubles up to 1998.

I believe it was an organised thing: an undercover operation bringing together members of the army, the UDR and the RUC with loyalist terrorists, sanctioned at a high level

Many innocent people were also killed by the security forces. As the SDLP’s spokesman on justice I had to highlight the need for fundamental reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and in particular those instances when policemen were involved in terrorist activities in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.

The most notorious of these loyalist groups was the Glenanne gang of paramilitaries, men from the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment, based three miles down the road from my home in Markethill. For a time in the 1970s this band of sectarian murderers were allowed to kill and bomb seemingly at will throughout Cos Armagh and Tyrone and across the Border as far as Dublin.

They were based on the farm of an RUC reservist called James Mitchell outside the village of Glenanne, and may have been responsible for up to 120 deaths, including those in the May 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the July 1975 Miami Showband attack.

A Protestant friend first told me what was going on in Glenanne.

“They’re at it,” were his exact words.

“Who’s at it?” I asked.

“The police and the UDR are working with James Mitchell,” he replied. I knew Mitchell to see, nothing more.

I believe it was an organised thing: an undercover operation in this area bringing together members of the army, the UDR and the RUC with loyalist terrorists that was sanctioned at a high level.

I WOULD RANK John Hume among the great leaders of Irish constitutional nationalism, men like Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. There is a greatness about John's political life, what he did and what he helped to change.

The peace process of the 1990s was a well-deserved triumph for Hume in particular. As his deputy leader for 20 years I recognised that the Belfast Agreement was the culmination of more than three decades of work based on his dual principle for a just solution to Northern Ireland’s problems.

I never saw myself as being in John’s shadow. At times John and I would have disagreed about some things, often about the tone of things, but we agreed on most of the fundamentals: Irish unity by consent, opposition to violence and commitment to the democratic process.

Much has been said and written about the relationship between John and myself. Some of this is real, some fanciful. What problems there were between us were largely caused by a lack of communication.

John was a remarkable genius, extraordinarily talented, egocentric and very resistant to criticism. He much preferred working on his own. For such a gregarious man, John was very much a loner in his political life, reluctant to keep the party informed about matters important in the development of its strategy and policies; notably the early moves in the peace process.

The SDLP, who had struggled for so long to keep the flame of decency and democracy alive, paid a high price for conceding republican ground to the Provos

Sometimes I felt he disliked the routine business of party politics and felt encumbered by the need to report his plans and actions to the rest of us in the SDLP leadership and party. Generally, John and I got on well; we had great respect for each other.

I did worry about the Hume-Adams talks. I was concerned that democracy in the North – at that time riddled with mistrust and self-doubt after so many failures – was being bypassed, and I was worried what this would do to the SDLP, the Ulster Unionists and the other constitutional parties.

I was not the only senior SDLP politician who was worried, and I believe, looking back, that our concerns were well founded. I remember a testy SDLP meeting around a month before the August 1994 IRA ceasefire at which I expressed serious qualms about the likely trajectory of events. My strong view was that as a political party the SDLP would come out of this arrangement badly.

When we entered discussions with Sinn Féin, we handed the baton on to them in many ways. Maybe it was the price we had to pay for peace, but unfortunately we also legitimised them.

The SDLP, who had struggled for so long to keep the flame of decency and democracy alive, paid a high price for conceding that republican ground to the Provos.

IN THAT EXTRAORDINARY Holy Week leading up to the signing of the Good Friday agreement, in April 1998, we had Tony Blair flying in with the hand of history on his shoulder, and a sleepless Bertie Ahern dashing between Dublin and Belfast to keep vigil over his mother's body and then attend her funeral.

When Blair had arrived at Stormont on the previous Tuesday afternoon, "the situation looked bleak". Gen John de Chastelain put the chances of success at 20 per cent; George Mitchell even lower.

Somewhere around 2am on Good Friday morning we had a final meeting with the Ulster Unionists. John Hume and I went down to tell the Irish government about the agreement with the unionists, and I think they were taken by surprise. We were understandably overjoyed and excited.

While we explained the agreement to Bertie Ahern and his officials, the door opened and what appeared to be a sleepwalking Mo Mowlam, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, shoeless as usual, came in, looking like Lady Macbeth.

She sat down beside me, put her head on my shoulder and went to sleep. I let her rest there and carried on speaking. A few minutes later she lifted her head and in pure schoolgirl English exclaimed “Fucking brill, Seamus”, and went back to sleep. I think I may have been in tears at that point.

IN THE END it took the IRA 11 years after their first ceasefire to put their arms completely beyond use, and that led to huge mistrust and misunderstanding, which has beggared the practice of politics ever since. During this period the more extreme DUP took over from the Ulster Unionists as the main unionist party, and the more extreme Sinn Féin replaced the SDLP as the main nationalist party.

So the IRA keeping their arms for so long enabled Sinn Féin to move to a central and decisive position in the politics of Northern Ireland.

I have a vivid memory of saying to Blair at a dinner in Hillsborough that the SDLP was the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland yet he was doing a lot of talking behind our backs to the smaller nationalist party Sinn Féin. His answer was breathtaking: "The trouble with you fellows, Seamus, is that you have no guns."

TWENTY-ONE YEARS on from the Belfast Agreement, this is an appropriate moment to look at the further evolution of the agreement, while remaining absolutely faithful to its key principles.

Changing demographics in Northern Ireland have led to a situation where for the first time the unionist parties are in a minority in the Stormont Assembly, and the deeply destabilising impact of Brexit has triggered an almighty flux in unionist-nationalist, North-South and Irish-British relations.

One immediate result has been the suspension of the Northern Ireland institutions. A stalemate has set in, and nobody knows how we can begin to move forward again.

A new reality may be beginning to take shape at a pace few of us foresaw even a short while ago: some kind of move towards Irish unity may be a possibility for the first time since partition (certainly a substantial section of Northern nationalists now believe this).

To persuade the unionist community that there is no need for them to live apart from the rest of the island is now the only meaningful programme for nationalism

For all the reasons just given, it becomes vital that we initiate a dialogue about that much hoped for – and much feared – outcome which is calm and reasoned and which, above all, ensures that we learn the lessons of British-Irish history, and avoid at all costs its traditional regression into violence.

We have to find some more inclusive and generous way to quantify consent so that it reflects true parity of esteem between unionist and nationalist communities.

I propose replacing the “sword of Damocles” of a 50 per cent plus one Border poll with the doubly protective “shield” of parallel consent.

To persuade a significant part of the unionist community that their fears are groundless, and there is no need for them to live apart from the rest of the island, is now the only meaningful programme for nationalism.

This is the last major obstacle to be overcome if we are to realise the nationalist aspiration for unity. The biggest challenge for nationalists in the foreseeable future is to help our unionist neighbours face an uncertain future with some confidence, even optimism.

This is an edited extract from A Shared Home Place, by Seamus Mallon with Andy Pollak, published by Lilliput Press