‘One of the best of the good guys’
Seamus Mallon helped to change sectarian attitudes in Northern Ireland, writes Liam Collins
SEAMUS Mallon never really emerged from the long shadow of John Hume. Nonetheless he was one of the most influential figures in changing sectarian attitudes in Northern Ireland and devoted himself unstintingly to that cause as a major figure in the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and at Westminster.
There was an awareness that tensions often arose between himself and party founder Hume, but ever the gentleman it was not something he discussed publicly. He was, said Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell, “one of the best of the good guys”, sentiments echoed by most of those who got to know him in those troubled times.
He also coined the memorable phrase that the Good Friday Agreement was “Sunningdale for slow learners” — meaning that if Sunningdale had been implemented there would have been no need for the Good Friday Agreement and many lives might have been saved.
In his memoir he wrote of John Hume: “I would rank him among the great leaders of Irish constitutional nationalism, men like Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell.” But the two SDLP leaders pursued political objectives in different spheres.
“I never saw myself as being in John’s shadow. He had chosen a role for himself that he carried out extremely well. I ploughed my furrow and did all I could to change the culture of violence and injustice endemic in our society,” he wrote in his memoir A Shared Home Place.
While Hume performed on a world stage, Mallon was essentially a local politician, although during his time as an MP in the House of Commons he did not restrict himself to Northern Ireland matters as most MPs from there, both nationalist and unionist, tended to do. He also formed unlikely friendships, such as with Enoch Powell the Conservative and unionist standard-bearer.
Before his political career he was a Gaelic footballer, a member of the Armagh GAA county team which won the Ulster championship in 1957 and he won three Ulster championship club titles with Crossmaglen in the early 1960s. In later life he was a fly fishing enthusiast and enjoyed a game of golf.
Seamus Mallon’s father was a teacher from the town of Markethill in Co Armagh, his mother Jane from a strongly republican family in Castlefinn in Co Donegal. He said he had “lived all my life among Protestants” as the town was only about 10pc Catholic at the time and his childhood friends and neighbours were not the same religion as him, but it made no difference at the time.
“When I grew up there in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s it was a happy childhood and I felt secure and well looked after. I grew up in a loving and comfortable home”.
After getting his 11 Plus exam he went to St Patrick’s College in Armagh for a short time before switching to the Abbey CBS in Newry, where he was a good scholar and sportsman, winning a MacRory Cup medal in GAA with the school in 1954.
He later regretted not studying law at Queen’s University, instead opting for teacher training. His first job was at St Joseph’s in Newry, where his pupils included Pat Jennings, who later went on to be the star goalkeeper for Tottenham Hotspur and Northern Ireland and the boxer Dan McAlinden.
He met his wife Gertrude when they were both 15 and they married in June, 1964 when he was a qualified teacher and she a nurse.
After taking an interest in housing discrimination he became involved in the Civil Rights movement in 1968 and was one of the organisers of a march in Armagh the same year. “It was frightening: for the first time in my life I saw close up the awful snarl of sectarian hatred in the face of people I knew and met every day of the week.”
In A Shared Home Place he says the last march he attended was an anti-interment protest in 1972. He was elected to Armagh District Council the following year and becoming involved in the fledgling SDLP in 1975.
“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,” he wrote. “The toxic effects of violence and counter-violence seeped into every aspect of life.”
In 1973 he was elected as one of 19 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the SDLP, making it the second biggest party after the Ulster Unionists. He recalled driving past the statue of Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of opposition to Home Rule in the early 20th century, in Stormont, saying: “What am I doing here? How can we as a party create a new inclusive society under this symbol of supremacy and exclusions, of a unionism and Britishness that has always regarded the like of me, as an Irish nationalist, an alien being?”
Mallon was not part of the negotiations that led to the Sunningdale Agreement signed in December, 1973 and leading to the short-lived power-sharing government which took office in January, 1974.
During the decade that followed, between the collapse of the Northern Ireland Constitution Convention and his election to the House of Commons, Mallon was mostly unemployed, the family depending on his wife’s salary. He did lecture tours and journalism before returning to St Joseph’s.
In 1982, much to his surprise, he was nominated to the Seanad by Charlie Haughey along with John Robb and participated in debates with a certain amount of difficulty during the short-lived three month Fianna Fail government. After finding that the only way to get speaking rights was to threaten to go public with his difficulties, he said: “It was an indication of the attitude to Northerners: keep them in their box if at all possible.”
There were fears in the Garret FitzGerald-led government and the Department of Foreign Affairs that Mallon would not support the report of the New Ireland Forum because of his “core belief” in Irish unity. But he did and said it “proved to be a real milestone and the beginning of new hope for nationalists” because for the first time the British government was not over-ruled by the unionist veto and it gave the Irish government the new right of “consultation” on the future of the six-county state.
He was elected to the House of Commons for Newry & Armagh in a by-election in January, 1986 and he successfully contested the general election that soon followed.
“I came into the House of Commons at a good time for an Irish nationalist from the Parnallite tradition,” he later wrote. He had a good working relationship with unionist MP Ken Maginnis and strangely enough became friendly with Enoch Powell “though our politics were radically opposed”, he said.
“He was a brilliant man out of his time; a man who could have been prime minister had it not been for his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech against immigration.”
But back home the RUC had intelligence that Mallon was a target of the Ulster Freedom Fighters — a cover name for elements in the UDA — and his home was twice the target of arson attacks in 1989 when, luckily, the family was away.
Although Mallon had a sometimes uneasy relationship with Hume, it didn’t deter him from giving credit where it was due.
“The peace process of the 1990s was a well-deserved triumph for John Hume in particular. As his deputy leader for 20 years I recognised that the Good Friday 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, which had been tried and trashed in the brief 1974 power-sharing and Sunningdale experiment.”
While Hume was an international statesman Mallon operated on what he called “the battleground that was policing and security”.
Much of the commentary around their differences was caused, he said, by a lack of communication. “John was a remarkable genius, extraordinarily talented, egocentric and very resistant to criticism.”
But for such a gregarious man Hume was a political loner and aloof from day-to-day politics and impatient about the details of running of a political organisation.
On the other front he once complained to British Prime Minister Tony Blair that while the SDLP were the largest nationalist party in the North, he was going behind their back to talk to Gerry Adams and Sinn
Fein. “The trouble with you fellows, Seamus, is that you have no guns,” Blair replied.
But the Good Friday Agreement, he said, was “the beginning of the end of the domination and corruption of those [Northern Ireland] institutions by the unionist elite over the previous 80 years”.
By 1998 Mallon was Deputy First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly sharing what he called “the burning deck” with unionist leader David Trimble and had to deal with tragic events like the Drumcree stand-off between Orangemen and the security forces outside Portadown and the Omagh bombing.
But a year later he was threatening to resign as Deputy First Minister because of what he saw as Trimble’s ‘foot dragging’ about implementing in full the Agreement.
On September 17, 2001, John Hume announced his decision to step down as leader of the SDLP and two days later Seamus Mallon announced that he would be resigning as deputy leader and would not be seeking election either as leader of the SDLP or Deputy First Minister.
“I had got the feeling even when I was Deputy First Minister that the Irish government was making plans to abandon the SDLP for Sinn Fein and the British government to leave the Ulster Unionists for the DUP,” he said. He left the House of Commons in 2005.
In his memoir Mallon recalls going to funerals of constituents, Catholic and Protestant, including members of the security forces, but one left a lasting impression that brought home just how difficult things were in Northern Ireland.
“I remember going to the funeral of Fergal Caraher, from a well-known IRA family in Cullyhanna, who was shot by Royal Marines in an incident the local community regarded as an example of ‘shoot to kill’ in that he could have been arrested before the soldiers opened fire.
“The graveside oration, a republican tradition, was given by the Sinn Fein politician James McAllister, who launched into a verbal attack on me across the open grave, calling me a UDA lover and a Brit lover, among many other terms of vilification.
“It was a lonely station, to say the least, being harangued in a cemetery in the middle of a crowd of IRA supporters, where I had come to say my prayers for the dead. I could have walked away but did not. I stood my ground — cold, shocked and alone, but I was sure I was doing the right thing.”
In many ways that terrible episode sums up the man, his beliefs and the strength of his convictions and character.
His wife Gertrude died in 2016. Seamus Mallon, who died last Friday at the age of 83, is survived by their daughter Orla.
‘I stood my ground — cold, shocked and alone’