It's a cruel injustice, by any standards, but the SDLP meets in Belfast for its annual conference this weekend at a time when it is rivalling the DUP as the North's forgotten party.
Delegates can again take quiet pride (it still has to be quiet for diplomatic reasons) in their role in persuading the republican movement into mainstream politics. But the skill with which Sinn Fein is exploiting that move must be disconcerting to all but the most stout-hearted in John Hume's party.
Sinn Fein's success has been much more than the brilliance at media management the SDLP is always happy to attribute to it. The republicans have made dramatic electoral gains on the back of organisational and financial resources the SDLP simply can't match. Sinn Fein's hegemony in Belfast, in particular, looks set to be crowned next year by the election as mayor of Alex Maskey - "millennium mayor", as a gleefully partisan taxi-driver put it in Belfast last week.
And while the SDLP stands on the sidelines - still waiting for the executive 25 years on - Sinn Fein has been hogging the limelight in the seemingly endless negotiations with the Ulster Unionists - so far a no-lose situation for the republicans.
Even their respective websites reflect the difference in the parties' moods. The SDLP's is sedate and understated, apart from a thank-you to the "190,731 supporters" who voted for John Hume in the European elections, and a counter showing more than 127,000 people have visited the site since 1996.
But Sinn Fein's is the website of a movement: a dynamic mix of everything from potted Irish history to an archive of recent IRA statements, links to other Irish-interest sites, and of course an invitation to the $500-a-head dinner in New York last month. It doesn't say how many people have visited the site, but an estimated $500,000 visited the party coffers as a result of the dinner.
The recent eclipse is all the more galling because the SDLP has won all the arguments about how the North should be governed, single-handedly creating the middle ground on which Sinn Fein and the UUP are now wrangling. And during a break in the negotiations at Stormont last week, Mark Durkan - heir-apparent to John Hume - admitted frustration.
On the one hand, he spoke of the party's confidence in its own capacities when the institutions are up and running. On the other, he added: "Have people in the SDLP developed an empathy for the prodigal son's brother? Yes they have."
And yet Durkan himself - unusual in the SDLP in being both prominent and under 40 - highlights one the party's greatest weaknesses, according to Brian Feeney, a long-time SDLP councillor now out of the fold and a columnist with the Irish News.
"Organisationally, it's in a dreadful state. But one of the biggest problems is that the original founders have kept it to themselves, and they're all in their 60s now. Not just the founders, but the people who were around from the early years. Hume, Mallon, McGrady, Sean Farren, Denis Haughey, Brid Rodgers, they were all there 30 years ago.
"They've never allowed the emergence of a second 11, and the party's suffering for that. There's a terrible shortage of people in their 40s or early 50s, whereas other party leaderships have switched down a generation. Trimble is 52. Adams is 50-ish, though his party tends to be younger."
SDLP spokesmen and women are quick to point to a recent influx of bright young things. Like party vice-chairman Sean McKee and Ronan McCay, now in John Hume's office in Derry - both 20-something and part of what Assembly member Alex Attwood calls the "single most talented generation of people to join since the founders". It is also pointed out, more quietly, that four of the five current student officers in Queen's University are SDLP activists.
This is indeed true. As is the other frequent assertion by the party, that while Sinn Fein is gaining votes, so is the SDLP.
A 1997 study co-authored by Prof Brendan O'Leary of the London School of Economics suggested both parties were benefiting from a demographic bulge among new voters - a development which, the study claimed, meant the 1997 poll would be the last general election in which the unionist bloc (a category excluding Alliance) would win more than half the vote.
The authors noted that the proportion of "cultural Catholics" in Northern Ireland was up to 42 per cent in the 1991 census, and since then had continued to rise. "All nationalists are the beneficiaries of this changing demography, although Sinn Fein, so far, is benefiting more than the SDLP. In a survey we conducted in May 1996, almost 60 per cent of Sinn Fein's support came from the 1834 age cohort, three times the level of support among respondents aged 55 and over."
Claiming a second coming by the republican party, the authors wrote that it had broken out of its "10 per cent electoral ghetto" to average 16.5 per cent in the 1996 Assembly and 1997 local and general elections. The reasons were twofold: the demographic changes and the peace process, through which the party had won votes "that might otherwise have gone to the SDLP, a fact which SDLP canvassers conveyed with dismay to one of the authors."
Brian Feeney, for one, believes the dismay is justified. "Young people are voting Sinn Fein three to one. But the party is starting to get the female vote as well. In greater Belfast, 60 per cent of the SDLP vote was from women, because they didn't like the violence. But that's slowly changing. "Sinn Fein is now respectable. Graduates vote for them. And what you tend to forget is that some people have been voting for them for 17 years now, so you're starting to get their children voting. As people get older, maybe they'll switch back to the SDLP, but there's no guarantee of that.
"Sinn Fein are younger, they're better organised, they're better funded; and, it's an awful cliche, but they're sexier. They also have the whiff of sulphur about them, they're seen as more radical. And at the same time, Gerry Adams is using language invented by the SDLP. He's talking about `our divided people', and the SDLP doesn't know what to say. It's one thing to have your clothes stolen, but it's unprecedented for a party to invite another party in and to help them on with the stuff."