"Dublin is Just a Sunningdale Away?" : The SDLP, the Irish Government and the Sunningdale Agreement

This paper examines the roles played by the Irish government and more particularly
Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in both the making
and the breakdown of the 1973 Sunningdale agreement. It asks whether the combined
efforts of the SDLP and the Irish government pushed unionist negotiators too far at Sunningdale, producing a settlement which was predetermined towards Irish reunification, and so justified loyalist claims that 'Dublin is just a Sunningdale
Away'. The paper draws on recently released archival material to show how the SDLP was, to a significant degree, able to dictate Dublin's policy on Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, suggesting that this led to a uniform and highly ambitious agenda on the part of nationalist participants at the Sunningdale conference. However, it also demonstrates that this agenda was not realised, and that the deal made at Sunningdale was not, as many scholars have suggested, an unqualified success for the SDLP. Nonetheless, the paper maintains that the dynamic rhetoric and perceived momentum of Irish nationalism-orchestrated largely by the SDLP-served to distort that which was actually agreed, and in this undermined the prospects of broad unionist support for Sunningdale.