Agreement means equality for all - Durkan
The Good Friday Agreement is not about victory or defeat for anyone in Northern Ireland but equality for all, the leader of the SDLP said tonight.
On the final leg of his first tour of the United States as SDLP leader and as Stormont Deputy First Minister, Mark Durkan said at Boston College that Northern Ireland’s politicians needed to sell the Agreement more to a society still divided along sectarian lines.
In a speech casting the SDLP as ‘‘new nationalists’’, he argued: ‘‘The Agreement is not about winners and losers. It is not about victors and the vanquished.
‘‘Above all, it is not about creating or maintaining a cold house for anybody.
‘‘The very opposite is the truth. The Agreement is about rejecting the zero sum game - that insidious theory that in Northern Ireland one community’s gain can only be the other community’s loss.
‘‘It is about undermining that false logic with a basic truth: when people work together, everybody benefits.
‘‘That is the crucial message. We should all be delivering it.’’
Mr Durkan, said the Agreement was about creating ‘‘an equal house, a shared house’’ for Catholics, Protestants and dissenters.
Catholics, he noted, still lagged behind Protestants in ‘‘almost every socioeconomic indicator, especially unemployment’’.
The gap was closing and must continue to do so, he said.
He also expressed concern that working class Protestants tended not to pursue third level education and suffered from a lack of community infrastructure.
Mr Durkan said: ‘‘To all these problems there is only one solution - to fight poverty wherever it is found and to target those in greatest need.
‘‘For it is no better to be unemployed in the Catholic Bogside than the Protestant Fountain in Derry and it is no better to be poor on the Protestant Shankill in Belfast than the Catholic Falls.’’
The SDLP, Mr Durkan told his audience, was committed to achieving a new Ireland which fought disadvantage and deprivation and eschewed flag waving, triumphalism and sectarianism.
The party realised unionists and nationalists needed to interact and interrelate and not merely coexist.
Mr Durkan said his party was also ‘‘working determinedly’’ for a united Ireland which had the consent of a majority.
But he added: ‘‘Come what may we realise that we will always require agreed structures of government embracing the two great traditions of the island of Ireland, working together as partners and as equals.
‘‘We stand today, as we have done since our foundation out of the non-violent civil rights movement, for opportunity through social justice, for community through social partnership, for unity through peace.
‘‘Ours is a new nationalism - one that does not conduct itself by the standards of old unionism.
‘‘We work for the true unity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.
‘‘Our goal is to weave us all together in one garment of destiny. We invite others to join us in this - our peaceful cause.’’
