The Belfast Agreement is not about victory or defeat for anyone in Northern Ireland but equality for all, SDLP leader Mr Mark Durkan said in a speech last night.
On the final leg of his first tour of the United States as SDLP leader and as Stormont Deputy First Minister, Mr Durkan said at Boston College that Northern Ireland's politicians needed to sell the Agreement more to a society still divided along sectarian lines.
In a speech casting the SDLP as "new nationalists", he argued: "The Agreement is not about winners and losers. It is not about victors and the vanquished. Above all, it is not about creating or maintaining a cold house for anybody.
"The very opposite is the truth. The Agreement is about rejecting the zero sum game - that insidious theory that in Northern Ireland one community's gain can only be the other community's loss," he said.
"It is about undermining that false logic with a basic truth: when people work together, everybody benefits. That is the crucial message. We should all be delivering it".
Mr Durkan, said the Agreement was about creating "an equal house, a shared house" for Catholics, Protestants and dissenters.
Mr Durkan said the SDLP was committed to achieving a new Ireland that fought disadvantage and deprivation and eschewed flag waving, triumphalism and sectarianism.
Mr Durkan said his party was also "working determinedly" for a united Ireland which had the consent of a majority.
But he said: "Come what may we realise that we will always require agreed structures of government embracing the two great traditions of the island of Ireland, working together as partners and as equals".
PA