This chapter analyses the memoir-writing that has emanated from the ranks of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), for many years the leading party representing the predominantly Catholic Irish nationalist minority community in Northern Ireland. Founded in 1970, as an extension of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, the party produced some of the key protagonists of the Troubles era, and it could be argued that many of its institutional and policy prescriptions found their way into the eventual settlement of the 1998 Agreement. This has not been borne out in increased popular support; indeed, since 2001, the SDLP has been firmly eclipsed by the growth of Sinn Féin (SF), and despite several changes of leadership since the retirement of the iconic figure of John Hume, the party remains marooned in the doldrums. If it should come as little surprise that there is a gulf in understanding and interpretation between nationalist memoirists and their unionist counterparts, then it may be noteworthy that the memoirs studied here do tend to reveal subtle distinctions within the SDLP. This chapter uncovers some of the complex diversity of lived experience within the Catholic nationalist political class, and specifically seeks to examine the evolving attitudes of these men towards the Stormont system (and the Northern Ireland state more generally), towards power-sharing with unionists, and towards the violent armed campaign of republican paramilitaries. The chapter concentrates upon the early period of the Troubles, paving the way for a specific case-study of the power-sharing Executive of 1974.

It should be noted that the memoirists considered here are all males. It is an important point that there exist few memoirs by women in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict; this is an accurate reflection of the dominance of men in both the ‘constitutional’ political sphere and also in paramilitary organisations. This chapter will make occasional reference to the memoir-writing of Bernadette Devlin (born 1947), a student leader of People's Democracy in the late 1960s, before her election as a Westminster MP for Mid-Ulster in 1969. Although her politics were certainly a long way from those espoused by the SDLP (and remain so), she was a significant player in the civil rights movement, alongside many of those from the Catholic community who subsequently founded the party.