The death last Tuesday of Austin Currie was marked by tributes to him and the party that he helped to found, tribute-payers steering clear of that party’s complicated history and his part in it.
Immediately after a death is no time for balance and reservations.
The early SDLP was a stormy creation. Like the DUP it was very much created by the Troubles. There the similarity ends.
The DUP was a vehicle for Paisleyism as defined by Ian Paisley. He remained the dominant Trump-like figure until what he certainly regarded as mutiny in the ranks, long after he should have left the stage, again like Trump. He memorably referred to himself as the Pope and his acolytes as his cardinals, though the cardinals failed to laugh a fraction as heartily as he did. In the DUP there weren’t so much splits as casualties.
Currie on the other hand was one of a bunch of spectacularly different individuals drawn together in the creation of the SDLP, never comfortably, and for years co-existing in uneasy alliance. Plenty were strong, indeed dominating personalities. When John Hume emerged as the most talented and widely-acknowledged some inevitably spiralled off out of the party, most notably Paddy Devlin and the original leader Gerry Fitt.
Currie in the Caledon squat was earlier; well able for television debates, a gift then and later to reporters because ready to talk on anything. Fitt’s most significant contribution had also come earlier, before the party came into being, when as MP for West Belfast in the 1960s he influenced many in the British Labour Party and government. He played a notable part in a British government setting aside the decades-long convention, disastrous for anti-unionists and for the state of Northern Ireland, that the Unionist party was left to govern without London supervision.
Persuasive, engaging, salty tongue a contrast with passive, dull Unionist MPs Fitt was no parliamentarian in the traditional sense. When frustration with Unionist refusal to reform had already begun to infuriate London, Fitt did his best work in Westminster bars with sympathetic Labour MPs who pressured Prime Minister Harold Wilson and later Jim Callaghan. He cultivated journalists, spurred on left-wing backbenchers to help influence their frontbench. Labour government changed the NI rules, nationalist politics developed traction. And as the Troubles began in earnest there were lots of star roles, none starrier than Fitt on October 5th 1968, bloodied shirt in his Commons filing cabinet frequently pulled out for visitors.
With Fitt in London, Devlin was the frontrunner as Belfast man of the people. A new party had yet to create structures, constituency parties, administration, SDLP weakness from the outset. There were others as gifted as Currie, natural freelances with no organisation to absorb them, no mere spear-carriers for Hume. After an era with broadcasting dominated by deferential interviews with mostly unimpressive unionists, the late 60s brought new voices, young stars Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann.
Nationalists were impressed, also sceptical, cynical. The ‘old Nationalists’ couldn’t even be called has-beens, having never counted at Stormont. Disrespected because they had no clout, they reaped more scorn for taking part in Stormont in the first place – scorn Currie mostly escaped, thanks to youth and broadcasting ability.
The first target of pre-civil rights Hume-thinking had been northern Catholic ‘non-participation’. But violence drowned argument. Loyalists terrorised Annita Currie, the IRA killed a policeman guarding the house. With no Stormont after 1974 apart from brief unsuccessful assemblies Currie, like many others nationalist and unionist, had to earn a living, find other roles. He went south, joining Fine Gael.
Living into an era when the IRA’s descendant Sinn Féin has undermined the old Dáil order, his trademark loathing of the IRA intact, Austin Currie won tribute perhaps more of a piece from unionists and the Republic than Hume did. And the sight of Sinn Féin’s Francie Molloy and the retired Ken Maginnis waiting together for his funeral might have made him smile.
