DUP must accept Dublin’s role in North

First can I thank Ógra Fianna Fáil for inviting me here this evening. At a time when so many people find the North's politics a total turn off, it's good to find that some people are still tuning in to what's going on.

We are here this evening to debate Dublin's role in the North.

As you might expect, as an SDLP politician, I am a supporter of Dublin's role.

And I think the events of just this week show the strength and importance of Dublin's role - and the weakness of its critics.

Just a few weeks back FIFA made clear that everybody on the Northern Ireland team had to hold a British passport. Not surprisingly, some nationalist players for Northern Ireland were unhappy. They rightly asked why they should have to compromise on their legitimate identity and aspirations just so that they could play for Northern Ireland.

My SDLP colleague Pat Ramsey got onto the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Dublin. Dermot Ahern got onto FIFA. He argued that the Good Friday Agreement specifically guaranteed everybody in the North the right to identify themselves as British or Irish or both. The Minister also made it clear that FIFA had to respect that choice.

And just this week FIFA made clear that they would overturn their ruling. Irish passports would be accepted after all.

A simple problem. Simply fixed. Thanks to Dublin's role in the North. Simple as that.

But not everybody was happy.

Ian Paisley Junior gave out. Using his father's tired rhetoric he complained that a foreign government had no right to interfere. Many unionists politicians down through the years have made the same point, and only this week in the Restoration Committee at the Assembly, DUP politicians said the same when the SDLP asked them to give us their views on north-south co-operation.

But let me explain things from where nationalists in my constituency of South Down stand.

We don't just believe that we are Irish. We know that we are. And when a unionist politician says that the South is a foreign state it sounds very odd to our ears. Because like in South Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry City, there has never been a unionist majority in South Down.

Now we rightly accept, like the Agreement and like Dublin, that a United Ireland cannot come about without the consent of a majority in the North. But given the dubious border that was drawn and the dubious means by which it was secured, being told that Dublin is a foreign place, or that the North is a British place just won't do. The North has to be a shared place. A place where those who want to be British can be. And where those who want to be Irish can be. Where all identities are respected and protected with absolute equality whatever the constitutional status. That is the only way to manage our divided society.

That is why the SDLP does not just demand a role for Dublin while the North is in the United Kingdom. We also believe that London should have a similar say on behalf of unionists in the United Ireland that we want to see. We seek nothing that we do not offer ourselves - with each government guaranteeing the identity of the both communities in the North.

So Dermot Ahern's intervention - though on a symbolic matter - really did matter. Because it was all about what Dublin's role in the North should be.

It was John Hume who first pointed out that for the problems of the North to be solved, all the relationships had to be addressed. Not just between nationalists and unionists in the North. But between Belfast and Dublin. And between Britain and Ireland.

That is to say, the totality of relationships. And especially in the week that is in it, it's right to credit the man who first got the British Government to buy this analysis - Charles Haughey in the Anglo-Irish communiqué of 1980.

It is these three sets of relationships that the Good Friday Agreement provides for.

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