The Global Review of Ethnopolitics Vol. 3, no. 1, September 2003, 39-59 Special Issue: Northern Ireland Copyright © Jonathan Tonge 2003. Victims of Their Own Success? Post-Agreement Dilemmas of Political Moderates in Northern Ireland Jonathan Tonge, University of Salford Introduction The 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) appeared to offer a great deal to the avowedly moderate parties in Northern Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) could point to the principle of consent at the core of the deal. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) viewed the three stranded institutional arrangements of the deal as the culmination of its political thinking. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (Alliance) had long advocated devolved power sharing as the most appropriate political arrangement. Each of these parties has been beset by difficulties, however, whilst Sinn Fein, whose pre-1998 political approach was entirely at odds with much of the Agreement’s contents, and the anti-Agreement DUP have prospered. This article draws upon membership surveys of the Alliance Party and the SDLP and the ruling body of the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), conducted between 1999 and 2002, to assess the extent to which internal party divisions have impaired the post-Agreement performance of each of these parties. 1 The Crises within the UUP The UUP has been beset by division over the GFA since the deal was clinched in April 1998. Eleven special meetings of its ruling, 858- member, UUC have been held, each backing the position of the party leader, David Trimble, by a average majority of 56 to 44 per cent. Although the UUP remains a pro-GFA party, the extent of dissent within the UUC, allied to the electoral threat of the DUP has ensured that backing for the GFA has been based upon critical support and particular interpretation, the latter translated into an insistence that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) puts its arms beyond use and clarifies that its war is over. Despite being regularly defeated and at one point having three of its senior figures suspended, the unionist dissidents have declined to join forces with the DUP. Among the party’s members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, admittedly largely pro-GFA, only Peter Weir defected to Paisley’s party. Whilst the DUP has strongly attacked the all-Ireland element to the GFA, the party has also stressed a moral dimension to its opposition. Combined with zero-sum game appeals that the ‘equality agenda’ of Strand One also threatens the economic fortunes of Protestants, the party has updated its traditional twin appeal, to rural evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants and to a more secular loyalist working-class (cf.: Bruce, 1986, 1994; Todd, 1987). Indeed the party has been described as a politico-religious organisation (Smyth, 1986) and its leader remains the embodiment of Ulster Protestant fundamentalism, albeit assisted by more secular deputies (Farrington, 2001). A majority of its election candidates during the 1970s were members of the Free Presbyterian Church, an organisation that has grown in size over the last three decades, but amounts to less than two per cent of Northern Ireland’s Protestant population. 1 One other ‘moderate’ pro-Agreement party could have been selected. However, the centrist Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition has not yet been surveyed by the author. To offer balance, the article thus evidence from one moderate party within each community and one ‘non-aligned centrist party. The UUC survey received 299 replies from the 858 Council members (36 per cent); the Alliance survey 702 from 1,050 members (68 per cent) and the SDLP 528 from a claimed (but not verified) 3,000 members (the SDLP’s figure may be exaggerated, but the response rate here is given at a low 18 per cent). The differences in response rate are acknowledged. As these are the first datasets ever constructed on party members, the representativeness of replies cannot be reliably tested, even if, intuitively, responses appeared in accordance with what might be expected. The attitudes of the UUC may not necessarily replicate those found among the wider party. However, results were tested against a sample of 100 ordinary members, with no significant differences found. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the vast bulk (688) of UUC members are ordinary constituency delegates.