Ben Lowry: Seamus Mallon, a staunch nationalist who deplored violence

Both men were palatable to the other community in that they were not in the DUP or Sinn Fein. But both could be irascible and even hardline politically. One was very obviously of the Orange, Protestant tradition. The other very obviously of the Gaelic, Catholic one.

Neither was seen to be on the more moderate, diplomatic, compromising and even Alliance-inclined wings of their respective parties, the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP.

But by 1998 they were the key partnership at the helm of the new power sharing executive. At times they quite publicly did not get on, but seemed to forge a common partnership against the parties that would harry them and come to overtake their own parties, the DUP and Sinn Fein.

Some vignettes of Mr Mallon stick in my memory.

The first was in the early 1990s being under the gallery in visitor seats in the House of Commons that are at the side of, but effectively in, the chamber, and watching Ian Paisley coming across to joke in person with the then SDLP MPs, John Hume, Joe Hendron, Eddie McGrady and a grinning Mr Mallon.

In February 1999, by when Mr Mallon was deputy first minister, I remember seeing him sitting contentedly smoking a pipe in a busy Harbour Bar in Downings, Donegal, while Ireland was playing someone in the Five Nations rugby contest.

Young reporters, which in the early 2000s I was, found Mr Mallon and Mr Trimble and indeed Ian Paisley, somewhat brusque on the phone. But they often softened during a phone call and became warmer and humorous.

In the 2001 general election at the Belfast Telegraph I was told to cover Newry and Armagh, which struck a junior reporter as a dud posting because it seemed such a safe and so uninteresting seat. But a good election number cruncher told me that it might be a big story, because Sinn Fein could win.

They didn’t win but did come close. Mr Mallon’s margin over Sinn Fein, which had been 12,000 in 1997, plunged to just over 3,000. Conor Murphy would go on to win the seat comfortably in 2005, when Mr Mallon stood down, and when I returned to cover the constituency.

That latter Sinn Fein victory reflected the surge of both the DUP and Sinn Fein, but it also reflected the fact that Mr Mallon had a big personal vote in a seat which he had lost narrowly to Jim Nicholson of the Ulster Unionist Party in 1983, and then took narrowly from him in 1986.

During those 2001/05 general elections I talked to voters in places such as Crossmaglen, to try to report the mood on the ground.

Most of all I remember arranging to meet Mr Mallon on the sunny election day of May 2001, when he voted in his home town of Markethill, and watching him chatting to UUP canvassers who were based around a Mercedes.

That day I was witnessing a relaxed Mr Mallon in the environment which, according to people who knew him well, shaped much of his understanding of this society: a mixed but majority unionist town with, among that latter community, something of a frontier mentality, being one of the few mainly Protestant towns near republican south Armagh.

The following day at the election count, surrounded by local SDLP stalwarts such as John Fee, Mr Mallon toasted his narrow but nonetheless emphatic re-election.

In recent years he launched verbal attacks on the IRA’s record that were so scathing that many unionists would be hesitant to utter the same.

Two such onslaughts stick in my mind: one in an interview on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback, where he talked in withering terms about the murder of Patsy Gillespie and the notion that Protestant farmers were part of a war machine.

The other time was at the Irish government property in south Belfast for a meeting about the Dublin diplomat Noel Dorr’s book on Sunningdale.

Mr Mallon was also blunt about unionist failings. I recall him saying Catholics had for centuries slotted into their role as, in effect, serfs.

One day I had hoped to interview Seamus Mallon, but time ran out.

His party seemed in recent years to have been finished off by the new collaboration between Sinn Fein and the DUP. But in the last election it staged a revival. And David Trimble’s UUP, with almost 100,000 votes, is far from finished.

The story of Seamus Mallon is over, but perhaps not that of his legacy.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry: The gradual joy of January and the returning daylight