In the first of a series with leading figures from the four main parties, Gerry Moriarty joins the SDLP's Mark Durkan on the canvass in Derry
Mark Durkan is canvassing in the Meadow Lane shopping centre in the Co Derry town of Magherafelt with Mid-Ulster SDLP candidates Denis Haughey and Patsy McGlone.
The reception in the town is cheerful and friendly. One elderly gentleman William Watterson makes a beeline for Durkan to wish him well.
"I remember your father," he says. "That's right," says Durkan. "He was DI here over 40 years ago." And they happily reminisce for a couple of minutes about RUC Detective Inspector Brendan Durkan.
Watterson later says he has great time for Durkan and his two Mid-Ulster candidates - "The best three men in Ireland." He remembers too how Inspector Durkan was killed in a car crash in 1961. "He was a good man," he says simply.
Mark Durkan was only 10 months old when his father died, the youngest of seven children. His mother, Isobel, died last year. He laughs now, recalling how former chief constable Sir John Hermon once buttonholed him. "Your father would have been chief constable if he had lived," he told me, "and then there would have been none of this political nonsense out of you."
Durkan has neither hidden nor advertised that RUC connection, and it hasn't figured prominently in his political career. "But I remember one time having an argument with a Sinn Féin member at a polling station. It ended up with him shouting at me, 'Your father bate the civil rights marchers off the streets in '68'.
"Not only was my father dead in 1968 but, as my mother would say, he was that long dead he was tired dead." Earlier on learning of the death of Gerry Adams's father, also called Gerry, a veteran republican, Durkan had made personal contact with the Sinn Féin president to convey his condolences. There were political spats between the pair earlier in the week, but for both men this is above politics.
Some of his supporters would like Durkan to be more like Gerry Adams or even Ian Paisley. He's not. He doesn't have their pulling power on the political stump, and never will because neither demagogic bombast nor the whiff of cordite sits well with his personality. Yet on this bleak wintry day as the SDLP team canvasses in Magherafelt, people for the most part are cordial and good-humoured, exchanging comments and banter.
Then it's back to the SDLP bus and on to "long hungry Cookstown" in "Tyrone among the bushes". A local photographer takes shots of Durkan and the candidates. Later he meets a middle-aged woman who jestingly asks why she wasn't invited to be in the picture.
"You're not going to huff over that," says Durkan. "I'm a good unionist, I never huff," she jokes.
"Any chance of a number one?" "No, I'm a Trimbleite." "A transfer then?"
She laughs, but at least puts her thumb up, walking away. Hardly the cutting edge of canvassing repartee, but you could never imagine such unionist engagement with say the main Sinn Féin candidate in the constituency, Martin McGuinness. Equally, it's such transfers, from whatever quarter, that are absolutely crucial to the SDLP in trying to withstand Sinn Féin.
The SDLP and Sinn Féin talk about transferring down the pro-agreement slate of candidates, but hedge or equivocate when asked about moving main preferences from the SDLP to Sinn Féin and vice versa.
The SDLP left the Assembly with 24 seats, Sinn Féin with 18. The SDLP is under fierce pressure from Sinn Féin and under Durkan must defend shaky seats and try to make gains in difficult, traditionally unionist constituencies such as Strangford and North Down. Since the Hume-Adams talks the SDLP has been accused of being a soft touch for Sinn Féin, but no more, Durkan says. "We are getting away from the notion of the SDLP as a pastoral party that cares for the process and looks out for the process and the other parties who have problems and difficulties.
"We are moving beyond just being seen as a walking, talking version of an Irish Times editorial. We are promoting a very positive and active political platform of our own."
Against the odds he argues trenchantly that Sinn Féin and the DUP will not squeeze the middle ground.
"People know that the two parties who in their history have either offered us or tried to excuse some of the worst of our past are hardly the people who will give us the best of our future.
"They have held us back and are not suddenly going to be the parties to take us forward. People also see the arrogance coming through from both Sinn Féin and the DUP: that it is all about themselves, their own ascendancy, their own aggrandisement, rather than about real agreement," he adds.
"Everyone knows the result that Ian Paisley wants in this election: the DUP ahead of the UUP and Sinn Féin ahead of the SDLP so that he will then declare the agreement a bust. I think people are becoming increasingly wise to that and they won't give Paisley the result he wants."
Whatever about unionism, the nationalist wind at the moment appears to be behind Sinn Féin but Durkan disputes this.
"There is a new vigour to our campaign, we are managing our vote better than ever before.
"I am confident we will come back with a bigger vote share than Sinn Féin and a bigger seat share than Sinn Féin."