“And the Fianna Fáil MP enters the Commons...”

Stands the SDLP where it did? Slugger O’Toole asks the interesting question ‘why is the point of the SDLP’.

The future of the SDLP has come up as they are currently on the hunt for a new leader and none of the opinions available seem to be that appealing. The SDLP were the voice of moderate nationalism in Northern Ireland during the many dark years of the ‘troubles’. Despite being among the principal architects of the Northern Irish devolution settlement it is Sinn Fein (SF), and not the SDLP, that has reaped the electoral benefits.

The SDLP has a problem, it is withering on the vine. All of us involved in politics should remember that political parties can die. So what should the SDLP do? Accept that the game is up, roll over and accept it? No, I don`t think so. What they do need is a radical change in how they are seen and how they operate.

The perennial answer to this problem is for the SDLP to merge with Fianna Fáil (FF). The idea being that the nationalist and republican communities in the North would respond to a moderate republican all-Ireland party and turn their backs on SF. In terms of policy there is a degree of sense as both the SDLP and FF are broadly socially conservative and are rooted in working class catholic communities. The prospect of a merger was first seriously mooted a couple of years ago after there was some talk of FF beginning to organise and campaign in Northern Ireland. FF never really took this plan forward but has said it may yet do this in future. A couple of years ago FF was still a fairly popular government in Ireland and would have been seen to lend some strength where the SDLP was weak. FF does bill themselves after all as ‘The Republican Party’.

It is technically possible that the SDLP Could become part of FF, with FF then bringing some of its renowned organisational abilities to bear. That could lead to FF MPs being elected to the Commons. FF has already taken the step of registering themselves with the UK electoral commission as a Northern Irish political party.

But times have changed and FF is not the popular force that it once was. How would an FF government in Dublin deal with Northern Irish MLAs? How would the unionist political forces view the Irish party of Government flexing its muscles as an all-Ireland party? The only answer to this question that springs to mind is ‘unhappy bunnies’.

Would it be advantageous for the SDLP to effectively merge with the British Labour party in the manner the UUP has done with the Conservatives...obviously not. You can`t be taken seriously as an Irish nationalist movement while inveigling yourself with a British party which is Unionist.

For mergers there is another option that may be the answer for the party - merging the SDLP with the Irish Labour party (IL). IL are the third force in Irish politics behind FF and Fine Gael (FG) and in their modern incarnation are the product of a merger with Democratic Left (DL) some years ago. Current Labour leader Eammon Gilmore was himself a DL TD. Like FF, IL have stepped back from organising in Northern Ireland and have broadly left it to their sister party, the SDLP.

Curiously the stumbling block to these two Labour parties coming together is that do have significant differences politically. IL has never really had the working class community roots of Labour parties elsewhere. IL could be considered to me a much more ‘intelligencia’ based party and are generally social liberal in outlook.

There could, though, be real benefits for IL in becoming an all-Ireland party as it may provide in-roads into traditional FF communities in Ireland.

The likelihood of the SDLP merging with either IL or FF is very slight and as such they might not have much of a future at all.