SDLP did win the nationalist vote

Sir — Eoghan Harris was once again critical of the nationalist population of Northern Ireland (Sunday Independent, May 5).

He asked: “Why did nationalists not vote for the SDLP?” These articles are appearing quite regularly and do not reflect the reality of what happened during the Troubles in the North.

Sinn Fein contested elections for the first time shortly after the hunger strikes of 1981 when they put candidates up for the 1982 Assembly elections.

In that period from 1982 to 1994, the year of the first IRA ceasefire and when the IRA campaign was in full flow, the nationalist population never once voted in the majority for Sinn Fein.

In fact, the SDLP constantly out-voted Sinn Fein and normally got two-thirds of the nationalist vote, so Harris should stop saying they never voted for SDLP. In fact it took until 2001 before Sinn Fein out-polled the SDLP for the first time. The majority of the nationalist population never endorsed the IRA campaign.

These days Sinn Fein are comfortably ahead due to better party organisation and work on the ground, whereas the SDLP went stale.

I have no idea why Harris says nationalists are always playing the victim. If they did, could you blame them?

The unionists Harris is blindly a supporter of could not bring themselves to share the country with Catholics from 1922 until the late 1960s, when the Catholic population started campaigning and advocating for equal rights, which Harris agreed they were right to do since Harris was involved in the setting up of the Northern Civil Rights Association.

Harris puts the Protestants up on a higher moral plane than Catholics when neither are better than the other. Michael O’Driscoll, Mallow, Co Cork