Yes, I’m back putting pen to iPad2 to bring you some of the latest BREAKING NEWS and finest cerebral stimulation the local Twitterbloggosphere has to offer. However, unlike other lazy journalists who have abandoned the tried and trusted methods in favour of doing an Audiopoo into your ears, all my words will be firmly in the form of, um, words.
Today’s post de blóg is an exclusive interview I conducted with the SDLP’s Conall McDevitt. I’m glad to have landed such an exclusive, because Conall is notoriously shy and shuns all forms of media attention.
Mr McDevitt is aspiring to become the SDLP’s first party leader in almost two years.
I began by asking Conall why he thought he was the right man for the job. Palms open and fingers slightly apart to suggest openness and honesty, Conall said to me, “I think it’s time for Real Change. That’s me. I am Mr McChange, the changiest dude this side of the Island.”
Deftly punching a clenched –but not too tightly– fist to emphasise the point, he continued, “In this time of economic hardship, people all across the Twittersphere and the Facebooksphere are saying to me, ‘Conall, we really need reform of the institutions set up under the Good Friday Agreement, and partially modified under the St Andrews Agreement, and later tweaked at that weird Hillsborough Castle thing. How am I going to pay my bills, how are my children going to get jobs, unless we have reform of the political process and institutions, and an opposition in the Assembly, but still somehow with compulsory power sharing?’”
“That’s why I want to be SDLP leader Eamonn.”
Then I asked him, “What about the charge that you’re a whippersnapper and that you barely got elected on the 5th count in South Belfast, way behind Big Al?”
Reacting with a thumb placed across his index finger is a subtle but powerful gesture, he said, “As someone who has over a decade of experience in the quasi-private sector and worked for the SDLP, and later the SDLP, I think I represent a demographic that is basically everyone on this island.”
Leaning forward as if to suggest honesty, he continued, “You may call me a whippersnapper, but I have organised innumerable campaigns on Facebook that have touched countless lives. Through the power of Twibbons I have campaigned tirelessly for good things and against bad things. Let’s allow the public to decide if I am a whippersnapper or not (preferably through a Facebook poll of some sort).”
Finally, in my patented cheeky journalistic style I asked him, “What about the charge that you’re chancing your arm with this Real Change nonsense?”
Quietly shifting his hands into a steeple gesture to indicate that he was subtly in command here, he replied, “The time has come for new thinking in the SDLP. The sort of thinking we haven’t had at the top of the party recently. I begged Margaret Ritchie for new thinking for the last two years, but she didn’t do it. Not that she listened to me anyway. In fact, I never spoke to the woman, ever.”
Conall McDevitt, thank you very much indeed.
