On August 2, local BBC ran one of its Red Lines podcasts featuring Claire Hanna, MP for South Belfast & Mid-Down.
The BBC thought, as you might imagine, that the biggest takeaway from the podcast was that Hanna said she disagreed so much with Colum Eastwood’s plan to enter a partnership with Fianna Fáil that she had considered leaving the SDLP and forming a new party.
It was very revealing that her revelation turned out to be inconsequential. The real revelation was that no one cared. The story was dead on arrival. That more or less sums up the position of the SDLP. For years the party has been declining but no one cares about its fate. No one in the list of leaders since Hume’s retirement (four, which tells its own story) has been able to arrest that decline.
When Eastwood was planning to throw in his lot with Fianna Fáil the SDLP’s prospects were dire. Having lost Foyle they had no MPs, no one in Europe obviously, and the Stormont assembly was mothballed. Linking up with FF might have supplied some heft, but under........