The SDLP conference agenda featured a motion calling for Viagra to be routinely made available on the National Health Service. We'll avoid any gross opportunistic jokes here, but was it significant that the motion came from the party's youth branch?
Was this a subtle subliminal message that if the SDLP is to maintain its pivotal role in Northern Ireland it needs a transfusion of young red-blooded politicos to rekindle the civil rights spirit of its founding members?
The people who run the SDLP are not a Chinese gerontocracy, but there is no gainsaying that those who established the party from the embers of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s have more than a generation of tortuous, frustrating, occasionally uplifting politics behind them. Tiring business.
But it's not just an SDLP phenomenon. Look how long the leaderships of the DUP and Sinn Fein have been around.
One almost middle-aged, middle-ranking SDLP official was dismissive of any ageist criticism. Observing John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Joe Hendron, Eddie McGrady et al in the conference centre in the Wellington Park Hotel in Belfast on Saturday he said: "Say what you like about them, these people have stamina."
A colleague, Frank McNally, wrote a perceptive and fair account for Saturday's paper of the difficulties facing the SDLP; essentially how can it withstand the electoral challenge from Sinn Fein when republicanism has adapted to itself much of the argument fashioned by the SDLP, and when it has a more radical appeal to younger voters? Frank is Dublin-based, so the Belfast-based Irish Times staff had to take more than an earful from officials and delegates on his behalf.
"What are we to do? What are we to do?" moaned one official, whose basic point was that Sinn Fein was wearing the SDLP's clothes. It was pointed out to her that this was adverted to in the article.
But you could sense the frustration that there is so much media focus on Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionist Party because they are the central protagonists in the Mitchell review. John Hume, a few stone lighter and, while obviously not fully recovered from his recent operations, looking better than he has in years, also made the point.
"I know that our Assembly members, our activists and our supporters all feel impatient at the media and public attention devoted to others trying to resolve a dispute of their own making," he said in his keynote address.
It was interesting, too, that when the guest speaker, Peter Mandelson, praised David Trimble, there was warm applause from the delegates, but almost silence when the Northern Secretary paid tribute to Gerry Adams.
So what is the SDLP doing to ensure that it remains the chief nationalist political force into the next century? A lot, according to officials and delegates on Saturday.
It has embarked on a strategic review to improve its organisation, its electoral focus and its policy-making. That involves root-and-branch work, polls, research, reorganisation, opening of new research etc. "It's not as if we are unaware of the challenges ahead. We're preparing the ground for the future," said one official.
Ronan McCay, a 22-year-old politics graduate from Strabane, is one of the new generation. He's working in John Hume's office in Derry with the brief of rejuvenating the local organisation, and hopes to develop a model for opening new branches, bringing in new members, that would apply throughout the party.
As a young nationalist he had the choice of joining Sinn Fein or the SDLP but says he went for the SDLP because he believed it offered action rather than rhetoric. He conceded that Sinn Fein might have a sharper image but contended that many of his contemporaries were convinced that the SDLP had the better strategy and political arguments.
Mr Hume, in his 20th year as party leader, dedicated a good portion of his speech to identifying how the policies pursued by the SDLP were now the accepted political currency. Mr Mandelson would have swelled delegates' pride in the party by his description that through the past 29 years the SDLP was "the rock of democratic nationalism".
But some of the delegates quietly acknowledged that a new dynamism is needed to maintain the SDLP's vigour and relevance. Equally, it must be said that a sizeable portion of the 500 or so delegates were young people.
The issue of the future was really the hidden agenda of the conference, and it was certainly secondary to the main issue: in the words of Seamus Mallon, resolving the "miserable dispute" between Sinn Fein and the UUP and seeing the implementation of the Belfast Agreement and in effect the final fruition of the policy pursued by Mr Hume and the party.
Mr Hume and Mr Mallon, as has been the case through recent weeks, were short on specifics about developments in the Mitchell review. Nothing was given away on detail. Mr Hume believed the deadlock would be broken and once that happened "we'll come into our own".
Then the jibes about the SDLP's relevance would end: that was the message. Here was a party itching to be in government but frustratingly dependent for that end on the UUP and its chief political rival, Sinn Fein.
Mr Mallon appealed to unionists and Sinn Fein to sort out their differences over government and guns. His central lesson is that unionists and nationalists are all in this together. And he quoted John Hewitt to that effect: "We are changed . . . If not to kin, to co-inhabitants/ As goat and ox may graze in the same field/ And each gain something from proximity."
There have been livelier SDLP conferences. There was a certain weariness on Saturday, but again that's something applying throughout the entire Northern body politic. It will get better, delegates said. They were confident that getting into government, if that is achievable, would re-ignite the old spark. Power, not Viagra, was what they desired.