A chara, – Conall McDevitt MLA (June 6th) sought to morally exculpate the SDLP from his party’s calculated decision this week to rubber-stamp the passage of anti-Agreement unionist Jim Allister’s Civil Service (Special Advisers) Bill through the North’s power-sharing Assembly.
The Irish Times Editorial (June 5th) was accurate in observing that the SDLP have done themselves, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement, significant damage.
Mr Allister’s Bill is an affront to the agreement, to its essence, its values, its terms, its conditions and, not least, its ground-breaking equality and human rights agenda under constitutional and public international law.
It is a matter of historical record that when the conflict erupted in August 1969, shortly before they founded the SDLP, senior nationalist politicians like Paddy O’Hanlon and Paddy Devlin came to Dublin pleading publicly and privately for weapons to defend their community against wholesale pogroms by unionist mobs and state forces.
By its actions this week, the SDLP has now hypocritically singled out for immediate redundancy a political ex-prisoner currently employed as special adviser to Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, who, as a teenager, had personally suffered those very pogroms on his own streets in west Belfast before becoming involved in the armed conflict raging around him.
It is also a matter of record that, throughout the past 15 years since the agreement, republicans and political ex-prisoners have repeatedly served as special advisers to executive ministers – including when Seamus Mallon and Mark Durkan were respectively the deputy first minister.
Only now, at Mr Allister’s behest, has the SDLP leadership suddenly decided to support an exclusion agenda despite facing significant internal opposition in its own Assembly group.
The reality is that Mr McDevitt could have made a difference this week by taking a stand for human rights and the agreement, and voting for equality and inclusion through signing a Sinn Féin Petition of Concern. This petition would simply have ensured the agreement’s power-sharing voting mechanism was triggered, taking weighted account of cross-community opinion. That is the essence of power-sharing which the SDLP has now thrown on the scrap-heap.
Instead, on this occasion, the SDLP tried to cynically damage Sinn Féin by disgracefully abusing the rights and needs of selective victims, and by introducing a new “pecking order” of supposed deserving and less-deserving victims.
Yet, in so doing, the SDLP has merely ensured that political ex-prisoners will face even greater institutionalised exclusion and discrimination than at any stage since the agreement.
It is to the SDLP’s shame, and long-term detriment, that not one MLA had the courage to support the basic checks and balances of the agreement in order to protect its long-term values of inclusion and equality. – Is mise,
DAITHI McKAY MLA,
Sinn Féin North Antrim
Constituency Office,
Main Street ,
Dunloy,
Co Antrim.