Seamus Mallon: Forceful Northern politician who denounced IRA violence

The SDLP negotiation team noted early that both British and Irish governments had begun to regard the still only slightly- constitutional republicans as crucial to a stable peace, therefore more central to negotiation than the SDLP, for so long the respected voice of constitutional, anti-violence nationalism.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble and Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon speaking to the press at the inaugural meeting of the North South Ministerial Council in Armagh in December 1999. Photograph: Alan Betson “The first time I voted in a district council election was when I stood myself in May 1973,” he recalled much later. “It was very much a unionist area, no nationalist organisation, no way of dealing with, to use a phrase unionists use nowadays, the democratic deficit.” But he joined the Mid-Armagh Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Civil Rights Movement, and two years into its existence in 1972, the SDLP.

Media performances and speech-making replaced the amateur drama, though for decades some admiring SDLP colleagues hoped he would return to writing. But having given up his principal-ship for politics, within four years Mallon had no salary following the collapse first of the assembly, then the constitutional convention. For the next five years, the family relied on Gertrude’s wage as a nurse, with Mallon taking substitute teaching posts.

He enjoyed London, where a sister lived, and was much more comfortable in the House of Commons than the Europhile Hume. Never confidants, nor co-ordinated, their relationship was tested to destruction in the weeks leading up to the IRA’s first “total cessation” in August 1994. On August 18th, Mallon said it was clear there would be no cessation. Republicans should “be removed from . . . the process of creating peace”.

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