Once upon a time, the Social Democratic and Labour Party claimed the mantle of Irish nationalism in the Six Counties: peaceful, constitutional, but they were in some sense rooted in the idea of a self-determining people.
Today, that same party drapes itself not in the green of a sovereign Ireland, but in the blue and yellow of Brussels. Its leaders speak of Europe as though the future of the Irish nation were to dissolve into a continent-wide bureaucracy led by officials few voters can choose directly, a vision that is not nationalism at all, but a total surrender.
The SDLP’s Brussels-first integrationism is more than naïve; it is a fundamental rejection of what those who fought for Irish freedom have always stood for. From Wolfe Tone to Pearse to the men and women of Easter 1916 and beyond, the Irish struggle has been about freeing this island from every imperial yoke, not just cultural but economic as well. To imagine that replacing London’s dominance with Brussels’ is progress is to misunderstand the nature of sovereignty itself.
The European Union is not some neutral forum for cooperation; it is a project moving ever closer to political and cultural centralisation. Its institutions, resolutions, and funding priorities normalise a liberal social policy consensus which, in practice, throws away every nation’s moral inheritance and traditions, even where law-making supposedly remains with member states. For the SDLP, this is sold as modernity. For those of us who still believe Ireland should chart its own course, it looks like cultural, political, and economic annexation.
Most of the SDLP’s liberal turn is not organic to Irish political tradition but imported wholesale from Brussels and the wider Anglo-American policy class. The SDLP once claimed to speak for a sort of communitarian nationalism, yet its modern social agenda increasingly mirrors the platforms of EU-funded NGOs and continental party networks rather than the instincts of ordinary Irish people.
Nowhere is this clearer than on life issues. In 2018, the SDLP formally shifted abortion from a party policy to a matter of conscience for its elected representatives, in essence reaffirming pro-life language on paper while removing any binding discipline in practice. Since then, it has avoided clear commitments in manifestos and treated assisted dying with similar latitude, with senior figures signalling abstention rather than resistance. For a movement that once pledged to guard the vulnerable, this is not leadership.
Irish unity, if it is to mean anything, must not be brought about by surrendering our hard-won right to govern ourselves or on discarding the moral vision that sustained our people in darker times. It must be the 32-County Republic that cherishes and protects its children before and after birth, its families against atomisation and its sick and elderly from the cruelty of “assisted dying”. EU integrationism cuts against all of that. It offers empty rhetoric about peace and prosperity while binding nations into a system where decisions on migration, trade, taxation and even the dignity of human life are shaped far from the people they affect.
We should also not forget that Brussels’ interest in Ireland during the Brexit saga wasn’t driven by love for this island. Ireland’s position was leveraged chiefly to defend the single market and the needs of the Irish people were at best secondary. The SDLP’s uncritical gratitude to the EU reveals a party that has swapped whatever principles they had for European careerism.
The Irish nation is ancient and resilient. It survived conquest, famine, and partition. It deserves better than to be folded into an empire of directives and courts that sneer at the very traditions that sustained our people. The SDLP may think history moves inevitably toward a borderless liberal Europe. But Irish history teaches another lesson: that a free people must be vigilant against every new imperialism, including when it arrives with cheap slogans.
Ending the partition of our country, while a step in the right direction, is far from the victory for which our martyrs gave their lives. The Ireland that follows must have full sovereignty – culturally, morally, and economically and not be a province of Brussels, London, or Washington. Ireland should never be allowed to be relegated to a laboratory for imported ideologies. We must push for the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.
The SDLP is a British party, based in the north of Ireland, with MPs in Westminster. It is irrelevant to Brussels