The days when an SDLP leader could earn admirers in the South are long gone – as is any passion for unification
MARK DURKAN’S appearance in Dundalk this week on the Lisbon Yes trail got some notice when Sinn Féin No campaigners heckled him and the man beside him, Labour leader Eamon Gilmore. But Durkan’s recent announcement that he intends to step down as SDLP leader made few Southern ripples. Why would it: the SDLP scarcely registers in the Republic, nor the decent if uncharismatic Durkan.
Sinn Féin has all but monopolised whatever interest there is in Northern nationalism, or indeed Northern Ireland, for much of the past 10 years. As economic woes beset increasing numbers, it would be unrealistic to expect curiosity about the state of play in Stormont, much less a wider interest in how normal or otherwise Northern society has become. The North was a chronic pain to the South: peace cured the pain and made the North go away.
Through the pre-Tiger years there was conviction, soundly enough based, that Northern violence damaged the economy by deterring investment. There was also sympathy for those caught in what seemed never-ending conflict. By the last decade of the last century Southern sentiment had dwindled to something like: “Can we not just stop this?”
Some republicans, especially leading Sinn Féiners, accepted as their due the upsurge of attention during the peace process – the early years of which roughly coincided with the Tiger’s arrival.
Perhaps especially now, none are keen to volunteer how much they owed to the unique Southern status of John Hume, who was succeeded by the hapless Durkan.
Republicans always managed to screen out the notion that the IRA’s bombs and bullets were bound to push unification further away and could only diminish Southern interest in the entire question of Northern Ireland.
But Hume soared clear of the general alienation from the North, and drew a popular response that displaced the pretty strong disposition to do him down in the Dublin media, The Irish Timesalways excepted. The under-40s may well not realise that, despite his party's absence from Southern politics, the SDLP man regularly topped polls as most respected Irish figure, including when the question was "who would you choose for president?". What Hume proposed as settlement sounded fair and selfless to Southerners.
And when corruption scandals began to emerge around Southern politicos, the crusading Northerner looked all the better by comparison. Fianna Fáil’s leaders got the message, and suspended their misgivings about bringing republican subversives inside the fold.
First Albert Reynolds and then Bertie Ahern came on board the peace train, and gave it their best.
A simple end to violence would have satisfied some of their colleagues and constituents: peace on a just and equitable basis was a bonus. Helping to make peace garlanded Tony Blair, later tarnished by his advocacy of war in Iraq, and the philandering Bill Clinton: it also became Reynolds and Ahern like nothing else in their careers.
That was in a richer country. In today’s poorer State, interest in the dour and unprepossessing North is back to its default position and the 95 per cent-completed peace draws little attention. However far away “the unification of Ireland” was, it is further off now, a feature on no Southern manifesto. What is the Cowen instinct on unification, the Gilmore line, the Kenny line?
Even recast as the “aspiration” of old, the very term “united Ireland” lacks resonance – though unionists are not ready to declare their old bogey defunct, any more than republicans are willing to admit how they needed Hume, much less how their violence helped blow away the vestiges of the aspiration.
But the Catholic Irish republic marching into Protestant Ulster lost its oomph as nightmare a while back, perhaps when Charlie Haughey departed. Albert had no menace, Bertie no claws: they were men of peace, not of nationalist expansionism.
Northern nationalism has its own problems, almost independent of Southern developments. Sinn Féin has been shaken by its failure to capitalise on the peace and develop a Southern wing, which might in time replace the war veterans of the North. The SDLP’s prolonged decline might have been irreversible in any case, once Hume put peace before party and helped the younger, hungrier republicans in from the cold.
Today’s Southern state has neither time nor inclination for consideration of Northern Ireland. Bureaucratic input suffices for smart guys of both genders at desks in the Taoiseach’s office and Foreign Affairs, occasionally refreshed by visits to their Belfast outpost: like drainage experts or electricians maintaining a troublesome inherited property.
Which is how things were through the worst of the Troubles, but there was also passion then. All passion spent now: partition is solid as ever.