United For Equality

Gerry Kelly with Antrim footballers John Finucane and Aaron Douglas

By Gerry Kelly

A few years ago, Danny Morrison told me a story about the time he ran for election in Mid-Ulster. He was introduced to a man called John Joe Quinn from Pomeroy who asked him if he really wanted to win. “Of course I do!” said Danny.
“Then listen to what I am going to tell you.” He told Danny things he knew, things he took for granted, but it was refreshing and educational to hear these things spoken from the lips of a man who had been involved in many elections.
John Joe had worked in the Tom Mitchell campaign in 1955 when the IRA prisoner was elected MP for Mid-Ulster by just 260 votes. He worked for Bernadette Devlin in 1969 when she became the youngest MP ever elected.

John Joe told Danny that his parents, grandparents and great grandparent had struggled, marched and fought for the right to vote in order to have some say in their lives. That the right to vote was conceded grudgingly, first to Catholics who owned property but who could only vote for Protestant representatives.
That the franchise was slowly extended over a period of a century (and only later extended to women) but that even then it was people with money and influence, who had a hold over working-class people’s lives through employment or trade or religion, who swayed elections in favour of the establishment, the status quo.

He told Danny that these ‘opinion makers’ were later moved aside as ordinary people gained confidence to speak for themselves and represent themselves. Danny said that John Joe spoke in that earnest but slow Tyrone way which left Danny thinking that John Joe personally had witnessed two centuries of struggle!

John Joe Quinn’s principal advice was never to take votes for granted. Despite the high price that has been paid for the right to vote people can become complacent, apathetic or lazy and don’t appreciate its importance. He told him to canvass non-stop, from early morning to late at night.

To go to the top of mountains to isolated farms which had never been canvassed before and ask people to come out and vote. To knock on every door in every hamlet and town. To encourage a mood, a bandwagon feeling, which would unite people and motivate people around the same proud project of choosing who should best represent them. Danny took his advice and the city man got elected in rural Mid-Ulster!

That advice, never to take votes for granted applies to every candidate in this election. It applies to Alisdair McDonnell and the SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie who so ungraciously dismissed Sinn Féin’s real gesture to maximise nationalist representation by withdrawing Alex Maskey from the South Belfast contest in order to get Alasdair elected.

And it particularly applies to me in North Belfast, where I am seeking not just every republican vote but the goodwill of SDLP voters to oust Nigel Dodds.
The DUP are trying to frustrate the equality agenda Sinn Fein put at the centre of government. We are poised to take North Belfast for all of the people who live here, for the first time in over a century. It needs a good turnout on May 6th.

Together, we can do it! Together, we can take North Belfast!