Mark Durkan

Mark Durkan (born June 26, 1960, Londonderry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland) is a politician who represented the constituency of Foyle in the Northern Ireland Assembly (1998–2010) and the British Parliament (2005–17) and who served as leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) from 2001 to 2010.

Durkan entered politics while still a student at Queen’s University Belfast. He left school to work as an assistant to SDLP leader John Hume, who had been elected to the British Parliament in 1983. Durkan was an effective organizer and helped several SDLP members win election in the British House of Commons. For his efforts he was named chairperson of the SDLP in 1990. While active at the party level, Durkan also remained involved in his local community, and he served on the Londonderry (Derry) city council from 1993 to 2000.

When Durkan served as a member of the SDLP team at the multiparty talks beginning in 1996 to negotiate a devolved government for Northern Ireland, he brought with him the perspective of having grown up in Londonderry, where the “Troubles” (factional strife between the Protestant and Catholic communities of Northern Ireland) had been a way of life and which had been the site of Bloody Sunday in 1972. Over the next two years, a document was forged that would become known as the Belfast Agreement (Good Friday Agreement). While Hume was frequently characterized as the architect of the agreement, Durkan was recognized as its draftsman. When the Good Friday Agreement was put to a popular vote on May 22, 1998, Durkan helped deliver the SDLP vote, and he was elected to represent Foyle in the newly created Northern Ireland Assembly later that year.

When Hume stepped down as leader of the SDLP in 2001, his protégé Durkan was the natural choice to succeed him. Durkan presided over a difficult period in SDLP history, during which the party lost ground to Sinn Féin in both local and British parliamentary elections. Although it appeared that the SDLP had been relegated to junior status among Northern Ireland’s nationalist parties, Durkan orchestrated a rebuilding process, beginning with his own election to Hume’s former seat in Parliament in 2005. A softening stance by Sinn Féin in matters such as policing, however, made it difficult for the SDLP to distinguish itself from the traditionally more militant Roman Catholic party. In September 2009 Durkan announced that he would stand down as SDLP leader and relinquish his seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly following the 2010 British general election. At that election he retained his Foyle constituency for the SDLP. He continued to represent Foyle until 2017, when he lost his seat after a narrow election defeat.

In 2019 Durkan joined Fine Gael, and later that year he ran as the party’s candidate for the Dublin seat in the European Parliament. His bid, however, was unsuccessful.