DUP are now the reluctant minority
Creation of the SDLP changed the voting dynamic in NI entirely
The travails of the Northern Ireland Assembly, now on lifesupport, evoke memories of its predecessor, the Parliament of Northern Ireland, but with one key difference: the historical roles have now been reversed, and the role of recalcitrant minority, formerly the exclusive preserve of nationalists, has now been inherited by the Democratic Unionist party.
Long before the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, nationalists, their impotence carved in stone both by gerrymandering and the overall population balance, voted largely in vain for the Nationalist Party, or reacted either by abstaining from what seemed a contest they were guaranteed to lose, or in protest for abstentionist Sinn Féin candidates.
But the foundation of the SDLP by John Hume and others was more than a straw in the wind. Observing matters keenly was Cardinal William Conway, the Archbishop of Armagh, born in a part of Belfast that was then coming under huge sectarian pressure from neighbouring Unionist areas. Bombay street, near where the cardinal had been born, was a nationalist enclave targeted early on by Loyalist incendiaries.
Conway evidently saw himself as more than just the religious leader of the Catholic church in Ireland, and plainly viewed the emergence of the SDLP as a lever which could be used to move nationalists away from abstention, and from the increasingly threadbare rhetoric of the Nationalist Party (and perhaps also encourage them to distance themselves from Sinn Féin). The creation of the Alliance Party was another straw in the wind.
The cardinal saw an opportunity to encourage more sophisticated behaviour in the nationalist community in one of his Christmas addresses on RTÉ in the early 1960s, when he spent almost his entire allotted 30 minutes in an attempt to educate the Republic’s Catholics about the political realities of life for their co-religionists in the North, to the virtual exclusion of any specifically religious message.
He went further, and just before one of the elections to the Stormont parliament in the early 1960s, he specifically issued a call to nationalists of every hue (the SDLP had been founded in 1960) to play a full part in the electoral process, despite the gerrymandering and the discrimination (especially in housing) it reinforced.
By happenstance, I was visiting Armagh the day before the first election after he made his call for full nationalist participation in the political process. He had invited me to lunch and, as we sat there tucking into white fish and vegetables (no wine) his secretary Fr Lenny appeared.
‘Your Eminence,’ he said, ‘The Belfast Telegraph is on the phone. They want to know, in the light of your recent speech, whether they could take a photograph of you going into your local polling station tomorrow.’
The Cardinal turned to me with an air of inquiry which did not entirely disguise the fact that he was, as skilfully as ever, turning the question back on me in order to blunt the edge of the enquiry, or at least give him time to think up a suitable answer.
‘Well, your Eminence,’ I said, ‘You’ve just made this call for nationalists to engage fully in the electoral process. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t agree?’
‘It’s not as simple as you think, John,’ he said. ‘There are only two candidates in this constituency – a Unionist and an IRA man.”
It’s fair to say that I was having difficulty in searching for an answer, when he saved me the trouble.
‘Tell the Telegraph,’ he responded, mildly but carefully, ‘that I would prefer not to be photographed.’
I realised that I had been at the receiving end of a masterclass, not in religion, but in politics.