NORTHERN IRELAND:  The SDLP: The Struggle for Agreement in Northern Ireland, 1970-2000
By Seán Farren, Four Courts Press, 408pp. €39.95

OVER THE YEARS I enjoyed several working lunches with John Hume. They were pleasant affairs but usually disappointing from my perspective as a reporter. I was always looking for a news angle, trying to find out what was going on behind the scenes. But the SDLP man was not one for telling anecdotes or revealing secrets. He was obsessed with one big idea: how to formulate and promote policies that would advance the cause of peace and shared government in Northern Ireland.

This book is a bit like that. It is focused on policy rather than personalities. As such it is an invaluable record for historians and students of the Troubles. Seán Farren writes with the dispassionate authority of someone who chaired the SDLP. He depicts the “struggle for agreement” of the title as the struggle by the SDLP to persuade everyone else of the necessity to address the three core sets of relationships governing Northern Ireland: between nationalists and unionists, between north and south and between Britain and Ireland.

The SDLP, founded in 1970 to provide a non-violent and proactive nationalist response to the crisis that was tearing Northern Ireland apart, came up right away with this template for a lasting solution. The 1973 Sunningdale Agreement was essentially the party’s achievement, but it was wrecked when Harold Wilson capitulated in the face of a loyalist insurrection. The Council of Ireland it envisaged was too much for unionists to swallow, especially after Hugh Logue called it the vehicle that would trundle them into a united Ireland, and for republicans the SDLP failed to gain the end of internment or reform of the RUC.

After a further quarter century of mayhem, the three core relationships would again form the basis for accord, in the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Seamus Mallon called it “Sunningdale for slow learners”, but this time it did not threaten unionists with a united Ireland, it had all-party and international support, it included reform of policing and justice, and it was endorsed in referenda north and south.

Between Sunningdale and Belfast, when the SDLP was a party-in-waiting, it sought in Mallon’s words to “kick the ball into the courts of the only people who can solve the problem – the British and Irish governments”.

London and Dublin did pick up the ball and came up with the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement, designed to boost the SDLP in the face of a growing democratic challenge from Sinn Féin. The SDLP dithered from time to time on whether to enter pacts with Sinn Féin to prevent unionists winning seats – and this contentious issue was only laid to rest last weekend by party leader Margaret Ritchie, when she told her party conference in Belfast that a better society in the North could not be created by “driving people into sectarian trenches”.

Amid signs that the IRA was seeking to wind down its war, Hume began privately meeting Gerry Adams on the principle that it was the responsibility of democratic politicians to engage in dialogue if it might end violence. With the UK by then committed to facilitate unity, if that were the wish of the majority, Hume could impress on Adams the classic SDLP message that it was for those who believed in Irish unity to persuade, democratically, those who did not.

Farren recalls the hammering that Hume got over his dialogue with the then-ostracised Sinn Féin leader from influential sections of public opinion in the Republic (where TV viewers last month voted him “Ireland’s greatest”). Michael McDowell accused Hume of setting back the intercommunity peace process, Conor Cruise O’Brien charged him with cutting a deal with terrorists and Eamon Dunphy depicted the SDLP leader as “a political bomber flying over unionist heads trying to kill them”. Farren acknowledges that the Hume-Adams dialogue also caused unease among SDLP members, helped raise communal tension and motivated UDA attacks on the homes of party members.

By helping bring Sinn Féin into the peace process Hume also, but not by design, created the conditions for the decline of his party’s share of the nationalist vote. Sinn Féin was able to steal the SDLP’s clothes and, armed with a trump card – the ability to make the IRA go away – persuaded nationalist voters that it could cut the best deal for them. As Tony Blair put it, cruelly, to an SDLP delegation during negotiations over the IRA’s decommissioning of weapons in 2002, “Your trouble [is], you have no guns”.

Conor O'Clery is a former Irish Timesjournalist. He was northern editor from 1973 to 1976. He is now working on an account of the last day of the Soviet Union, to be published next summer