All of us at times remember when we have shot off at the mouth, but Mark Durkan has also put his two feet into it. To say that his comments at Oxford are disastrous, would be an under statement. The reality is that he has greased the slope under the feet of those, who for years have been pushing the boulder of equality up the hill and given sectarian Unionism the equivalent of an injection of Viagra.

It may have been the summer of discontent, the weather, rising fuel and food prices, or even the big bang experiment that could end the world, that prompted Mark Durkan to hanker back to old Lord Brookeboroughs 'golden days.' Or as happens now and again maybe the SDLP leader had a bad hair day for who in their right senses observing the antics of Unionism of whatever hue, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement could even contemplate the restoration of power to mindsets still rooted in 1690 and in denial that they had ever discriminated against their Catholics neighbours in the North.

The timing of the proposal by Mark Durkan that Unionist majority rule if rooted in a Bill of Rights would become the future panacea for equality and justice in this island, is mind boggling, since every proposal for a Bill of Rights going as far back as 1968 by the then Civil Rights Movement to the current proposals under the Good Friday Agreement, has been sabotaged by Unionists.

Whatever Mark Durkin said during his speech at Westminster was certainly not a robust defence of that Agreement and no amount of protesting that he has been misquoted or misrepresented can undo the damage that his ill thought out and ill conceived remarks have done to the attempts to resolve the current difficulties in implementing the outstanding requirements of the Good Friday Agreement.

Shooting of ones mouth and then trying to shift the blame doesn't wash with people as sophisticated as the North's electorate. Even if one read the five column damage limitation claw back by Mark Durkan in Fridays' Journal' in which he attempts to explain the two feet in the mouth remarks, by claiming that the whole issue is wilful lies by Sinn Fein who are misrepresenting him and are the instigators of the 'big lie'.

Come on Mark. It wasn't Sinn Fein who welcomed your statement that that the Good Friday Agreement should be unravelled to accommodate the needs of the DUP and anti agreement Unionism. It was Upper Bann DUP MP David Simpson who led the Unionist chorus of well done Mark, when he stated that 'at long last the SDLP accepts that mandatory coalition and designation voting is not the best form of government for Northern Ireland'.

There is something telling about the word 'long' as used by Simpson. Perhaps he knows something that we don't or is inferring that the real political home of the SDLP is within the class system represented by Unionism.

The system of mandatory coalition principally negotiated by the UUP and the SDLP is a fundamental principle of the Good Friday Agreement, but both parties in recent times have not been averse to voting against their coalition colleagues when it suited their political agenda. The notion of a formal opposition within the Assembly has been gaining ground for some time and the Durkan speech is just another stepping stone for Unionist to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement, which they never fully accepted. Who would ever have imagined that the hard won political gains that began with the courageous efforts of John Hume and Gerry Adams, to find common ground and ended enshrined in an agreement, an international accord ratified by the electorate on both sides of the border, could be wiped out by the disastrous utterances of a politician who should know better.

What other explanation can there be for the extraordinary comments of the SDLP leader who appears to have forgotten that the root cause of the conflict on this island was largely because of Unionist intransigence, since partition.

As Brian Feeney states in the Irish News, 'Mark Durkan has rejected that fundamental position and ignored the theoretical underpinning of the Good Friday Agreement because his nose has been put out of joint by the present Sinn Fein/ DUP axis.'

And that's the rub. Instead of hanging in with Sinn Fein as John Hume did despite being vilified by some members of his party, and confronting the DUP whose agenda is to destroy the agreement, and I suspect the UUP would do likewise, the SDLP have been consistently sniping from the sidelines purely because of selfish party political interests.

The Nationalists/ Republican electorate are sufficiently intelligent to understand that the present cross community mandatory system in the Assembly is not perfect but it was built on the recognition that the Unionist leopards have not sufficiently changed their spots to guarantee a level playing field with those whom they share this island.
The regime that perpetuated fifty years of discrimination against the Catholic has not gone away as is evident by their opposition to the introduction to a Bill of Rights which Mark Durkan believes could form sufficient protection for minority communities.

Where has he been in the past ten years when every attempt to agree on a Bill Of Rights has been and continues to be sabotaged by both Unionist parties for no other reason than they cannot accept that the Nationalist people are Irish and equal and entitled to the same rights as they.

The reality of that situation which Mark Durkan appears to forget is that the abuses, the discrimination; the anti Catholic sentiment is still part and parcel of the Unionist psycho. Where are the indications from Unionism that a new spirit of tolerance and respect for diversity has entered their sectarian heads?

Their political spokespersons have consistently denied that the blatant discrimination in voting, housing, work, in the North and particularly in this City, ever took place.

Indeed as we approach the 40th Anniversary of the 5th October Civil Rights March in the City, the SDLP would do well to recall that Derry is still at the bottom of the league tables with Strabane in terms of investment, jobs, and infrastructure, despite the fact that they have been the majority party in Council and represented the City in Westminster and in Europe for the major part of those years.

The lunacy of Durkan abandonment of the principles of power sharing has given political Unionism the kiss of life and subverted the efforts by Sinn Fein to progress the outstanding issues contained in the Good Friday Agreement. He has stopped the boulder at the crucial stage near the top of the hill which means that Republican/ Nationalists can expect no movement on the issues of policing and justice issue, the Irish language, education, cross border co-operation and the removal of the extraordinary powers of the police and the Special Branch, which Unionist still regard as their private force, despite Sinn Fein's participation in Policing Boards.

It was Seamus Mallon who described the Good Friday Agreement as Sunningdale for slow learners. Mark is not slow. He just hasn't learned.