Is romancing the SDLP right for Fianna Fáil?
Micheál Martin’s plan to venture North will involve him in a merger with a party even more spectacularly in decline than his own
The emergence of new political parties is often a consequence of major political events. The North’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) emerged from the 1968 Civil Rights movement. The mass support that movement produced among the nationalist population surprised the old Nationalist Party as much as the Unionist Party. The Nationalist Party, a continuation of John Redmond’s Irish parliamentary Party in the six-county state, no longer fitted the political bill.
As the ...
