Thanks for Alasdair

FROM HIS FIRST WORDS you knew the SDLP had made the right decision in picking Alasdair McDonnell as leader. Having just won the slow bicycle race that was the contest for the party leadership, which electrified people the length and breadth of a handful of homes in south Belfast, Downpatrick and Derry, he stood mumbling live on television, pleading with his handlers to, “Turn off those lights. Jesus, I’m blinded.”

Responding with the alacrity that the SDLP’s backroom team of MLAs’ relatives are famous for, they blundered about for a bit. Almost ten minutes later, he was still asking, “Why are the lights coming on?” looking like a bewildered older gent who wandered onto live television by accident but who was really looking for the bathroom.

There were, as you might expect, mixed feelings about the SDLP election contest in our republican enclaves. There were a few people pulling for Alex Attwood in the hope of an easy life. Having marginalised him to irrelevancy in Belfast and on the Executive, an Attwood leadership would have been an easy enough one to handle.

But as my good friend Omar Little once observed, “How you expect to run with the wolves come night when you spend all day sparring with the puppies?” True for you, Omar. Sure, taking the SDLP with Attwood at the helm would be easy but we need challenges to hone an election organisation that’s not just fighting elections in the North but the big players down South.

Conall McDevitt, a man who mystifyingly built his political career on the back of being Margaret Ritchie’s entire brain trust, would have been a tougher challenge than Attwood. But rarely has a man been so insufferably smug about such meagre accomplishments, and his mates in UTV and the BBC have him on the airwaves enough as it is.

And as for well-meaning Patsy McGlone, if his dismal fourth-place finish hasn’t taught him there’s no place in the SDLP these days for people who have their dinner in the middle of the day, then there’s no hope for him.

Leaving us with the guaranteed amusement of a McDonnell leadership. Consider his first big idea: rotating ministries and Assembly positions.

“The problem we have is we have one ministry and a chairmanship and a couple of vice-chairmanships,” he said.

“What people are saying to me is that they want the cake shared out and I’m intending to share it out.

“I’m saying very plainly at the beginning of the new year that I will be sharing the cake out and there’s no implications in that positively or negatively.”

The cake. So the SDLP are not going to allocate ministries on the basis of talent (a paucity of which admittedly makes such an approach uniquely challenging), or even geography. It’s on the sole criterion of ensuring every pig gets its turn at the trough, at milking their expenses and enjoying the big salary and the perks.

You can just imagine the SDLP Assembly team meeting. ‘Well, Alex, you’ve been minister for a good few years now but Dominic Bradley’s putting in a conservatory so he needs the salary bump, and Colum Eastwood wants a new car so we’re making him a committee chair.’

Of course, I’m being a little silly. The reality, as we found out the next day, was that the ‘cake’ (Go bhfoiridh Dia orainn) needed to be shared out to avoid the families of SDLP reps dying by the side of the road, their lips green with eating grass for want of food.

Fearful of his colleagues ending up in ‘poverty’, McDonnell called for wage increases for MLAs. As the Belfast Telegraph pointed out, Assembly members (apart from republicans who take the wage of a normal citizen) are paid a minimum salary of £43,000, plus an additional £11,000 for those who are chairs of committees, £5,500 for those who are vice-chairs and £37,800 for those who are ministers.

So, they seem to be doing alright. It’s more than I earn and I’m able to feed and clothe myself.

Maybe McDonnell’s concerns were not for his colleagues but his own family. Perhaps the McDonnells are finding it tough to make ends meet. On top of his MLA wage, Alasdair’s only current or future sources of income are an MP’s annual wage of £64,000, two pension schemes, some shares, a travel agency he part owns, and rent from some of his properties.

Sure how would that keep a gentleman politician like Alasdair in the style to which he is accustomed? We should simply be grateful he’s willing to slave away for the pocket money he gets in the Assembly.

So, on that note, to our friends in the SDLP who elected him, on behalf of every grinning republican across the 32 and beyond, thanks a million for the big fella.