The SDLP: male or female?

A well-heeled woman from a very prosperous part of town told me recently that the SDLP was not doing enough to attract woman voters. Was she right?

I’ll start answering that question by defining the only real division in society. It’s not between conservatism and socialism since there is a little bit of each of these things in every party. It’s not between liberalism and fascism since these things can become attractive to most people in certain circumstances.

No, the only real division in society is between the man and the woman. That division has existed since before time began and continues to present itself in our advanced societies today.

So does the SDLP do anything for women? In essence, the SDLP is the party of womanly responses to the problems of society just as Sinn Fein are the party of masculine responses to the same problems. There is no point being with the people, as a socialist, if you’re not sure which half of the people to side with, the male or the female side.

The SDLP is a social democratic party, the initial purpose of which was to curtail the unjust excesses of the state in Northern Ireland through peaceful means. The SDLP called for massive state intervention to deal with social problems such as the lack of housing, thus curtailing the economic policies that prevailed in the UK state.

The purpose of the female party is surely to redress the imbalances created by the pursuit of the male agenda by government.

In the midst of the North’s Troubles, the SDLP was almost a perfect female party calling for massive spending on housing, education and health at the same time as it refused to participate in the violence. In other words the SDLP wanted the things that make life better for the woman - and just about everyone else - whilst trying to undermine the arguments that sustained the male of the species.

While men wanted to rehearse the arguments about who was right in our conflict, who had the most just cause, and who had the legitimate right to use violence, the SDLP were rehearsing sophisticated pragmatism and coming to the conclusion that our conflict was a waste of human life.

It was no accident that Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume came from this Maiden City, or that this city became the strongest stronghold of the SDLP. It is no accident either that the strongest influence on SDLP leader Mark Durkan’s life has come from his mother. Derry is a city of women, having a history of strong women who worked to earn many families’ only income. But it is also a very strongly Christian city. God becomes very near when people go through extreme trials in their lives and there can be few more serious challenges to the human spirit than extreme poverty. God was with people in their trials, and the Church became very closely identified with the people.

Christianity is of course a feminising influence in the world and a force for peace. It is no accident that the political party of peace will have a very strong identification with Christianity and organised religion, as it had in our circumstances. The SDLP and the Catholic Church very closely identified with each other over the course of the Troubles, and continue to do so.

Belief that violence achieves something worthwhile is the worst form of bad faith, determining as it does that evil is more powerful than good, and that human beings have only one destiny – to create hell on earth.

The SDLP has its origins in Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi just as much as in the constitutional nationalist tradition of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stuart Parnell, and John Redmond on this island. But these two distinct religious and political traditions are bound together by the belief that human beings are essentially good and that there is no point organising to kill others when we are all guilty of

imperfections ourselves. It is the acceptance of reality, and facing up to reality is what life is about.

But it is the SDLP’s links with Christianity that render the party an opponent of the male agenda, or masculinity, and masculinity’s answer to the problems the world faces, the very antithesis of Christianity.

The IRA, supported by Sinn Fein, gave the male answer to the problems of the North, and they failed. The North’s problems were not to be resolved through violence but through dialogue. Womanly talking triumphed over male aggression and violence.

To answer the well-heeled woman’s point in relation to the SDLP and women, it is necessary to point out that the soul of the SDLP is female; that the SDLP’s raison d’être is female; and that the SDLP’s ideal of peace on earth can only be met through the feminisation of the human species. The SDLP is the party of women, and in terms of politics on this island and further afield, the future is female!

*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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