THE SDLP annual conference opened in Armagh last night with key speakers severely criticising the DUP-Sinn Féin-led Stormont Executive.
Party chairman and South Down MP Eddie McGrady called delegates to recall the founding political aspirations of the party – Irish unity and social justice.
“Physical borders are easily transcended,” he said. “It’s the borders that separate the ‘haves from the have nots’ that need to be torn down; its the borders that create inequality for children because of the circumstances of their birth that need to be eradicated; it’s the borders of prejudice that separate communities from opportunities that need to be opened up.”
Like Mr McGrady, party deputy leader Alasdair McDonnell accused Sinn Féin and the DUP of contriving a crisis.
The South Belfast MP said the leading unionist and nationalist parties were acting out of self-interest and causing ordinary citizens to disregard local politics.
“We are in the middle of political and economic crisis here,” he said. “It’s not the high pantomime crisis of the contrived summer stand-off or the pumped-up macho crisis that both Sinn Féin and the DUP like to inflate every so often – so that they can star in their own stand-off show. In many ways it is much worse,” he said.
“It is an insidious, debilitating, low-energy, morale-sapping, depressing and very expensive political crisis that sees the political establishment at Stormont settling in comfortably, ‘doing very nicely thank you very much’ but doing very little for anyone other than themselves.
“In the meantime, he said, jobs disappear and hard-working families lose their livelihoods.”
As a result citizens “lose faith in politicians, lose faith in politics and lump us all together, condemn all of us as ‘one being just as bad as the others’.”
Dr McDonnell said the party must not lose hope.
“We can again transform politics in these times of disillusionment, fear and cynicism.”
Party leader Mark Durkan makes his address this afternoon.