Seamus Mallon
Humane and tolerant Irish nationalist determined to pursue a united Ireland by peaceful means
SEAMUS MALLON, who has died aged 83, was for 22 years, between 1979 and 2001, deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland. Though never in government office before serving as Deputy First Minister between 1998 and 2001, Mallon stood forth as a Catholic Irish nationalist determined at all costs and against all discouragement to pursue by peaceful means the seemingly impossible ideal of a united Ireland.
Throughout the internecine conflicts of the Troubles between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, in which some 3,600 people were murdered, Mallon, at grave personal risk, consistently condemned all violence in Northern Ireland, whether perpetrated by the fanatics of Unionism or the IRA.
He saw the danger, moreover, of attempting to create a united Ireland without some measure of Unionist consent, however difficult to obtain. In his view, to replace imposed Unionist authority in Northern Ireland with imposed rule from Dublin would merely create a new form of conflict.
This belief in the doctrine of “parallel consent” – Unionist as well as Republican – to the establishment of a single Irish state may have been wildly optimistic in the context of the murderous strife prevailing in Northern Ireland. It was informed, however, by the generosity and sense of fairness which distinguished Mallon’s career.
Not that he was altogether an easy man. David Erskine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, who equally strove for peace, described him as “skilful, incisive and brutal” in negotiation. John Reid, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 200102, remarked that he “could make ‘Good Morning’ sound like a threat”. Integrity and charm, however, are rarely natural allies.
The son of a Catholic schoolteacher, and the only boy among four sisters, Seamus Frederick Mallon was born on August 17 1936 in the overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist town of Markethill, south Armagh. Yet he remembered that in his boyhood, for all the discrimination and prejudice, there were still contacts across the religious divide. He recalled how, when the Protestants went off on their Orange parades in July, the Catholic farmers would milk their cows for them. And at home Seamus’s father, though stern and abstemious, was never a religious warrior.
So the lad grew up in the hopes of a more tolerant world. At the Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry and St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh he excelled in English, Latin and Irish, while commencing a distinguished career as a Gaelic footballer.
Seamus followed his father in becoming a teacher. His first posting was at a tough secondary modern school, St Joseph’s in Newry. Among the pupils were Pat Jennings, later the goalkeeper for Tottenham Hotspur and Northern Ireland, and Danny Mcalinden, who would become British and Commonwealth heavyweight boxing champion. The school was also a fertile recruiting ground for the IRA.
At this period, though, Mallon was more interested in theatre than in politics. But when a friend, with a family of 12, was told by a councillor that “no Catholic pig or his litter will get a house in Markethill while I am here,” Mallon took up his cause, with eventual success. This in turn led to his membership of the Mid-armagh Anti-discrimination Committee.
In 1970 Gerry Fitt, John Hume and others formed the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Three years later Mallon, filling in on the spur of the moment for a late withdrawal, was elected under their colours to the Armagh District Council.
Profoundly distressed by the beginning of the Troubles, Mallon developed his vision of an “Ulster neither Catholic nor Protestant, Celtic nor Scottish, Gaelic nor Anglo-saxon, but an Ulster of generous, garrulous, combative, hard-working and poetic people united for the first time in the common love of their home place.”
Reality, alas, was far removed from this dream: per head of population more people, Catholic and Protestant, were killed in Armagh than in any other county of Northern Ireland.
Mallon determined that he would attend the funerals of all local victims, whether Unionist or Republican.
“I was welcomed at most, but I was turned away from two or three.”
His reward as a peacemaker was to be constantly in danger, reprobated by zealots of both sides. Two graffiti appeared outside his house. “Seamus Mallon is an informer,” declared the IRA. “Hang Seamus Mallon, f – k the Pope,” recommended the Protestant extremists.
As to this last notice, Mallon wryly observed: “I always thought I got the better part of that deal.”
The dilemmas which he faced were irreconcilable. “I knew the Ulster Defence Regiment had to be disbanded because of abuses against nationalist people, but also that every time I voiced this in public I was adding further suffering to the relatives of those UDR men who had been killed by the IRA.”
To the end of his days Mallon abhorred the IRA’S Gerry Adams and Martin Mcguinness as agents of violence. On the other hand, it was by no means easy to discover virtue in the Loyalist paramilitaries.
In 1973, as one of 19 SDLP members elected to the new Northern Ireland Assembly, Mallon strongly supported the Sunningdale Agreement, which purported to establish a powersharing Northern Ireland executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland.
The collapse of this experiment after only a few months left him deeply disappointed. Years later, in 1998, he would refer to the Good Friday Agreement as “Sunningdale for slow learners”.
From 1960 to 1973 Mallon had been headmaster of St James’s Primary School in Markethill. In giving up teaching so as to devote himself to politics, Mallon was obliged to live on his wife’s salary as a nurse.
As unpaid deputy leader of the SDLP he was second-in-command to John Hume. This was a somewhat thankless position, for Hume was a lone spirit who did not seek co-operation.
When, in the 1980s, Mallon conveyed to his leader his concern about the policy of negotiating with Gerry Adams, the reply was sharp: “I don’t give two balls of roasted snow for what you think.”
Mallon, however, remained loyal to Hume. “We had rows,” he recalled, “but we never had a decent row … he was the vision man; I was the negotiator.”
In fact Mallon was largely obliged to concentrate on internal security, dedicated to the problem of creating a police force that could be accepted, joined and supported by nationalists as well as Unionists.
For himself, though, he said: “I did not want a police escort, because I did not want any policeman killed looking after me.”
In 1982 Charles Haughey, Prime Minister of the Republic, appointed Mallon to the Irish Senate. When later that year he was elected to a new Northern Ireland Assembly, sponsored by James Prior, he was obliged to give up his seat on the grounds that he was a member of a “foreign parliament”.
Mallon was wont to refer to the “dog days” of the 1970s and 1980s, when all his attempts at reconciliation came to naught. In 1986, however, he had the satisfaction of being elected to the Westminster Parliament as member for Newry and Armagh. He thus became the only Irishman to have been a member of the Irish, British and Northern Irish legislatures.
Over his 19 years as MP he thoroughly enjoyed his trips to London, where he felt far safer than in Ireland, and where his strong speaking voice commanded attention in the Commons.
He also had the satisfaction of rebutting Enoch Powell who, while otherwise friendly, mistakenly criticised him for quoting incorrectly from Wilfred Owen in his maiden speech.
From 1996 Mallon was a member of the SDLP team which took part in the all-party negotiations which two years later bore fruit in the Good Friday Agreement. This accord, which ended Direct Rule, established a new Northern Ireland Assembly, along with a power-sharing executive and a ministerial council drawn from both parts of Ireland.
In the ensuing elections the SDLP won 24 of the 108 seats, and, at 22 per cent, gained a higher proportion of the vote than any other party. Subsequently, from 1998 to 2001 Mallon was Deputy First Minister in the Unionist David Trimble’s administration, John Hume having forsworn this appointment.
After years in the political wilderness, Mallon was an important figure, conferring in 1999 with President Clinton at the White House.
Despite his differences with Trimble, Mallon admired the First Minister, as in the 1970s he had admired another Unionist leader, Brian Faulkner. Nevertheless, Trimble’s administration was deeply troubled and in 2001 came to grief over the IRA’S failure to disarm.
Trimble would briefly survive this setback; Mallon, however, aware of the Prime Minister Tony Blair’s meetings with Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, left office. Another concern was his wife’s incipient Alzheimer’s. He never forgot what he had owed to her, and cared for her devotedly. When Hume retired as SDLP leader in 2001, Mallon made no attempt to succeed him.
His most important achievement in office, in 2001, was his part in renaming the Royal Ulster Constabulary as the more neutral Police Service of Northern Ireland. Subsequently, notwithstanding what he regarded as the scheming of Peter Mandelson, he helped to lay the foundations for the Police Act of 2003, which, in line with the Patton Report of 1999, established a more equal recruiting policy between Catholics and Protestants.
Mallon was a chain smoker, both of cigarettes and his pipe. No one dared to object; when Bairbre de Brun, the Sinn Fein health minister, was asked to request him to stop poisoning the air in meetings, she quailed: “You must be joking.”
It was a huge disappointment to Mallon that neither the DUP nor Sinn Fein properly engaged with the reconciling philosophy of the Good Friday Agreement, and he felt that too much effort was made to appease them. To the end he believed passionately in building upon the centre ground, where the vast majority could feel secure and at home.
“A society grows great,’ he observed, “when old men plant trees in whose shade they know that they will never sit.”
Seamus Mallon published a memoir, A Shared Home Place, written with Andy Pollak, in 2019. He married Gertrude Cush in 1964; she died in 2016. Their daughter, Orla, survives him.