SDLP had no plan for life 'after Hume and Mallon'

The veteran Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) politician Bríd Rodgers has spoken of her sadness at the sharp decline in for her party in the 27 years since the Good Friday Agreement peace deal.

The former Stormont minister said the SDLP had been more focussed on trying to achieve peace than planning for what would happen afterwards.

Ahead of her 90th birthday, the great-grandmother looked back on the 1990s when she was a senior member of the SDLP negotiating team alongside leader John Hume and his deputy Seamus Mallon.

On the quest for peace, she told BBC News NI: "I suppose in a way you could say everyone was too busy trying to get there.

"There was no planning for after Hume and Mallon."

The SDLP gained more votes than any other party in the first election after the Good Friday deal in 1998.

In the most recent Northern Ireland Assembly election, it was in fifth place, with 100,000 fewer votes than 1998 and not enough seats for a place on the executive.

Rodgers was one of only two women to serve as ministers in the first power-sharing executive set up by the peace agreement.

Speaking in County Donegal, where she now lives, she said the agreement had been the highlight of her political life.

"It's great that we have peace," she said.

"The principles of the agreement were the principles that along with John Hume we had espoused for three decades."

Born in the Republic of Ireland in February 1935, she was a French teacher in Donegal before moving across the border in the 1960s.

Her husband Antoin, also from Donegal, took over a dental practice in Lurgan, County Armagh.

The couple had six children and Rodgers says it was difficult at times to balance politics with family life.

"I wasn't a born politician. I never intended to be in politics. I started through civil rights and working for equality," she said.

"It wasn't easy because I was the only woman in the room most of the time.

"The men would all go off, as they do, after a meeting and they would meet wherever, probably in the pub, and I had to go back [home] because I had children to look after."

Before she got involved in party politics in the 1970s, she re ing John Hume asking him to take action about an issue in Lurgan.

"I wrote a note to John and I said 'this is happening in Lurgan and it's awful the SDLP are doing nothing about it' and he just wrote me back one line: 'What are YOU doing about it":[]}