ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the distinctive political language of Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). In doing so, it considers two of the three processes which Hayward (Chapter 1: 9) suggests involve discourse acting as an instrument of conflict transformation: ‘(i) the construction of a (conceptual) framework within which negotiations can take place’; and ‘(ii) the facilitation of agreement between moderate and extreme positions’. With respect to the first process, the chapter demonstrates how particular discursive concepts used by the SDLP served to structure the political talks between Northern Ireland’s constitutional parties that began in the early 1990s. In this, it shows how the SDLP’s thinking helped to shape the ideological parameters of both the Northern Ireland peace process, and the basic political settlement arising from this, the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998. With reference to the second process identified by Hayward, the chapter explains how an ongoing dialogue between the SDLP and Sinn Féin from the late 1980s played a crucial role in drawing extreme political factions into the democratic mainstream in Northern Ireland. For this dialogue paved the way towards the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire of August 1994, which prompted a similar response by the main loyalist paramilitaries the following October. This, in turn, created a situation where political representatives of militant groups on either side of the conflict were eventually able to join the talks process which had already begun between constitutional parties in the early 1990s. As such, by opening up a dialogue with Sinn Féin in the late 1980s, the SDLP can be seen to have instigated an approach which ultimately ended with a political agreement incorporating both moderate and the more extreme sections of the two communities in Northern Ireland. In explaining these two processes, the chapter focuses largely on the period leading up to the 1998 Agreement, arguably the highpoint in the SDLP’s political influence. As such, it does not engage with the third role which Hayward suggests discourse can play in a situation of conflict transformation. This relates to the possible convergence of language between former political enemies when they are obliged to co-operate in the exercise of power in a post-conflict situation (see above: 9). In the case of Northern Ireland, this role has more obvious relevance to relations been Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) –
formerly staunch opponents, but now the leading partners in the new government of Northern Ireland – and thus may be more appropriate for consideration in the chapters of this volume which deal specifically with these parties and their support bases. However, here the focus is on the SDLP, and the role which the party played in achieving an initial peace agreement in Northern Ireland in 1998. Although this was supposedly superseded by the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, the latter was essentially a deal on the means towards the full implementation of the 1998 Agreement. Thus, although the St Andrews Agreement made minor procedural changes to the operation of the 1998 Agreement, the essential political architecture of the earlier accord remained intact. Accordingly, this chapter looks primarily at the achievement of what should be seen as the more important of the two agreements, the 1998 Agreement, and the vital role which the ideas and language of the SDLP played in this. The scope of the chapter is limited in other ways. Clearly, a great number of actors have contributed to the discourse and ideology of the Northern Ireland peace process, and there is not room here to explain fully the way in which the SDLP’s ideas have interacted with those of other parties to the conflict. In particular, changes to nationalist thinking in Northern Ireland – many of which have involved the SDLP – have both fed upon and fed into similar shifts in southern Irish nationalist ideology. As such, whilst the primary subject of analysis here is the SDLP, the party should be considered as a member of a larger Irish nationalist ‘family’. Consequently, this chapter is intended as a contribution to the wider literature on the evolution of Irish nationalist discourse. For the SDLP’s discursive and ideological innovations must be seen as related to and interactive with changes in the language of other members of the broad nationalist family (see Hayward 2004, 2009; Ivory 1999; O’Donnell 2003; and Shirlow and McGovern 1998). The chapter is also focused in terms of the emphasis which it places on John Hume, former leader of the SDLP, and a joint winner of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his part in negotiating the 1998 Agreement. During the course of his career, Hume developed a mode of political discourse so distinctive that it earned its own epithet: ‘Humespeak’. However, Hume was not the sole originator of Humespeak. Indeed, as other commentators have suggested (Currie 2004: 206; White 1984: 213-14), and as this chapter clearly demonstrates, Hume adopted verbal concepts from various sources, both within the SDLP and beyond. Nonetheless, he brought these concepts together in a coherent and highly influential mode of political expression. Thus, whilst the term ‘Humespeak’ is often used disparagingly – referring to the particular repetitiveness of his language – even critics have recognised the extent to which Hume’s phraseology came to dominate the discourse of the Northern Ireland peace process (Cunningham 1997; McGovern 1997).
