Minister who wants rid of UDA insists SDLP is here to stay

Margaret Ritchie says rival parties have caught up with the SDLP's analysis but it still has a leading role to play, writes Dan…

Margaret Ritchie says rival parties have caught up with the SDLP's analysis but it still has a leading role to play, writes Dan Keenan.

The North's Social Development Minister Margaret Ritchie hit the headlines at the weekend by putting it up to the UDA. No guns, no grants, she told the group, giving it 60 days' grace to start decommissioning if it wants to keep £1.2 million (€1.77 million) in government funding.

Setting deadlines can be counter-productive in the peace process but generally Ms Ritchie's move was welcomed, not least from people living in loyalist communities.

Even Frankie Gallagher, spokesman for the Ulster Political Research Group, which is linked to the UDA, while saying that ultimatums do not work, expressed confidence that the UDA would respond positively, if not necessarily within 60 days.

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However the UDA reacts, Ms Ritchie has demonstrated she is prepared to make bold statements to advance her agenda. She may be the only SDLP Minister in the Northern Executive but, for certain, her DUP, Sinn Féin and Ulster Unionist colleagues know she can fight her corner.

She admits it is "a bit difficult" to believe she is part of this "surreal environment" at Stormont where the DUP and Sinn Féin have finally cut a deal, but Ms Ritchie is getting on with it.

The SDLP Minister sits around an executive table with parties which, she believes, have finally come around to her party's view that inclusion, powersharing and a North-South dimension were the only alternative to stalemate.

It was the DUP and Sinn Féin who prevented previous attempts at powersharing from succeeding, she says, not only in 1974 after Sunningdale, but under David Trimble in 1998 too.

"They are now inside and having to work it," she says. "There's a certain satisfaction in it for me as a member of the SDLP. Everything we worked for - powersharing and bringing people away from violence and into partnership government - is now taking place." The DUP, Ulster Unionists and Sinn Féin are all "latter-day converts" to the SDLP position on non-violence and partnership, she says.

"We are the pioneers of partnership government way back since 1973," she says.

"I have no doubt this will work. The SDLP feels vindicated. What we wanted has now happened and the only difference is that those who sought to undermine it before are in the mainstream."

The mood at the executive table is certainly "gregarious", she says, especially between Martin McGuinness and the Rev Ian Paisley. However, there remains a sense that the camaraderie may be for the optics.

Ms Ritchie owes her job to party leader Mark Durkan's surprise decision not to take a ministry. She shares her South Down constituency with Sinn Féin's Caitriona Ruane, the Education Minister. She knows that republicans have sharpened their criticisms of her since she took office, perhaps because they see her, and not sitting SDLP MP Eddie McGrady, as the Westminster candidate on the ticket next time.

She declines to confirm the analysis - her coyness may tell its own story - and she prefers to point to the job ahead.

Politics, for her, is all about delivery and improving people's quality of life. Unprompted, she speaks for 10 minutes for those in substandard or inadequate housing, those who cannot afford to buy a home, and those flooded out in the June rains.

"There are three priorities in life - a roof over your head, food on the table and access to a job and training opportunities." She has already introduced, and had passed, welfare reform legislation and is co-ordinating action to deal with the 39,000 empty homes in Northern Ireland, 4,000 of them in the social sector.

Aside from the detail of housing strategy, fuel poverty, poor benefit take-up rates and the allocation of the first £16 million towards regeneration in loyalist and republican parts of Belfast, she returns to the big picture.

"The SDLP mission is ongoing. What we want is the creation of a new Ireland - it's not about territory, it's about the uniting of people and respecting difference." It is "absurd" to suggest that with other parties now sharing power and closer to the centre ground that there is no longer any point in the SDLP.

"We have to create that new Ireland where people can feel comfortable with each other," she says. "There is more to unite than divide us on the island of Ireland. That is the message of the SDLP."

But will unionists buy into that? "I think there is a greater understanding and appreciation of that. They see we are all in this to work together. Their identity is not being marginalised."

The SDLP deputy Assembly speaker John Dallat, who has been warned by police his life is under threat from loyalist paramilitaries, yesterday renewed his support for Ms Ritchie's decision to withhold funding to a loyalist community organisation if the UDA does not decommission.