Ex Student Seamus Mallon Honoured

Seamus Mallon was in attendance at the unveiling of a portrait in his honour.

Mallon’s ‘valedictory’ address

Veteran SDLP politician, Seamus Mallon, delivered a witty, powerful and at times a movingly raw address on the occasion of the unveiling of his portrait at the Abbey Grammar School, Newry Co.Down, his alma mater. The portrait by artist, Bruno Patron, was unveiled by Mr Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs before a host of dignitaries, family and friends. Speaking at the unveiling Mr Dermot McGovern, Principal, welcomed the assembled gathering by recalling how the famous maiden speech made by Seamus Mallon at Westminster in 1986 ‘set the scene for politics in Ireland for the next twenty years’. Dr John McCavitt, Head of Politics, commented that when Mr Mallon went to the Abbey in the 1950s ‘it would have been unthinkable that an ‘Abbey boy’ could achieve such high political office in Northern Ireland… Now Abbey students can aspire to the highest office in the land... Seamus Mallon, I am proud to say, has been an engine for that change and living testimony to it’.

Former Northern Ireland Office minister, Lord Dubs, recalled introducing Mr Mallon to the Commons following his election victory in 1986 and concluded that the former Deputy First Minister had done ‘a fantastic job for peace, for the people he represents, for the whole community here and indeed beyond that and I am honoured to have known him’. Mr Mark Durkan, leader of the SDLP , described Mr Mallon as ‘a person of real character’ who ‘stood for hope in days of hurt’, one whose ‘gut conviction and determination and doggedness but downright decency at the same time’ is widely admired, not least on Capitol Hill.

Describing Mr Mallon ‘as a personal hero of mine for many, many years’, Mr Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs said that it was ‘a particular honour to be here tonight and to be given the privilege of unveiling this portrait’. Recalling that the Deputy First Minister never shirked from calling ‘a spade a spade’, he paid tribute to him for his political achievements, not least in relation to the reform of policing in Northern Ireland.

In what Conor O’Clery, former foreign correspondent of The Irish Times, described afterwards as a powerful ‘valedictory’ address, Mr Mallon began by chirping that it was a ‘tremendous honour for me that the school are going to hang me in a short time … and that so many of you came along for that occasion’. He recalled his days at the Abbey and being part of the first ‘day school’ to win the MacRory cup in 1954.

Mr Mallon outlined the inspirations which moved him to a life in politics. In the 1960s, Civil Rights songs had ‘reverberated across the Atlantic’and there was a mood for change ‘in the air’ in Ireland. During his early days in politics he recalled the political ‘injustice’ which prevailed, calling to mind the old days of discrimination in housing at a time when ‘poverty’ was rampant.

Motivated by the ‘need for a just society’, he began ‘a very stony road’ when he was elected a councillor in 1973. Reliving the dark days of the Troubles he spoke movingly about the deaths of many whom he knew, including a UDR man who was ‘as decent a man as ever wore shoe leather’. Again and again, he recalled speaking out against the excesses of the UDR and the RUC only to be compromised by Republican paramilitaries killing members of the security forces, on one occasion witnessing the dying moments of a man left ‘under a cattle truck’. His condemnation of these killings in turn earned him brickbats on various gable walls. One mural satirised him as ‘Lord Mallon of Markethill’. In typically stoic fashion his reaction was that ‘I thought there were enough scoundrels in the House of Lords without me’.

Recollecting that he was accompanied by a BBC crew on the first day that he went to Westminster in 1986, the reporter asked him at the St Stephen’s entrance ‘how does it feel coming into the mother of parliaments, coming as you do from the hills of South Armagh… I said as good as any man there and better than most’. Describing the Commons as ‘a very fair place…a very just place’, he said it baffled him that it has been the scene of so many ‘unjust’ deeds, singling out Peter Mandelson’s attempts to water down the Patton reforms on policing and Tony Blair’s justification of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

With the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement fast approaching, Mr Mallon recounted that negotiations had been ongoing for many years previously. Those experiences distilled for him that the ‘secret of negotiations is to listen for the nuances, for the things that aren’t said, rather than the things that are being said’. Unionists, he believes, adopted a quantifying approach to talks. Nationalists, by contrast, ‘conceptualise rather than quantify..maybe it was because for so many years they hadn’t much to add, subtract or divide’.

Commenting on the contrasting reputations of the two power-sharing regimes, Mr Mallon referred to the so-called ‘odd couple’ (himself and Trimble) and the ‘chuckle brothers’. Putting on record his high regard for the former First Minister, he ruefully remarked that Mr Trimble had put his trust in the ‘wrong Prince’ (Mr Blair). Political circumstances, what is more, were much more difficult in the immediate aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement: policing and decommissioning had to be dealt with, Drumcree was ‘raging’ and there was the ‘awfulness’ of Omagh. By the time the new power-sharing ‘regime’ took office in May 2007, the new executive had inherited ‘ready made ‘arrangements’ in relation to the structures of government. In a rapier-like thrust aimed at the ‘chuckle brothers’, Mr Mallon commented that he had met the Queen and Prince Philip who Edinburgh ‘walks the same distance behind her (the Queen) as McGuinness does behind Paisley’.

In a hint perhaps that he disapproves of merger proposals between the SDLP and Fianna Fáil, he described the SDLP as ‘in danger’. In his view the institutions set up under the Good Friday Agreement will persist in the event of the British ‘leaving here…down the line’, as he believes they will. Then the ‘almighty questions will be asked’, including whether there would be a ‘32 county unitary state’. Concluding by making a ‘foolish prediction’, he anticipated that there will be a ‘federal Ireland’ that will enshrine ‘self respect’ for Unionists. ‘Safe’ in the knowledge that he will be not be around to see if his prediction comes true, in the event that it does he asked his audience to ‘get a large glass of whiskey, preferably Jameson’s, with very little water and drink it for me’.