Mark Durkan: The back room ‘fixer’ who took centre stage
Story by Pat McArt, Irish News 13 September 2025
While he’s no longer in elected office, Mark Durkan is still the quintessential careful politician, warning me from the outset he wasn’t up for ‘all that from the couch stuff’ about his life, and indicating that he didn’t really want to get into personalities or talk about his personal life.
And then, after two hours of interview, as the former Deputy First Minister walked out of the door of the Grianan Hotel, just over the border in Donegal, he turned back to me and said: “Hi Pat, you were asking about (former First Minister David) Trimble, let me tell you this one.”
And off he goes with this story: “One day after an Executive meeting, Martin (McGuinness) walks over to me and says, ‘How do you work with that man? He claims to be a big opera fan but I can tell you he’s not.’
“I asked Martin what was the problem.
“He said that he had gone over to Trimble and offered him a CD of an opera singer. Trimble just looked at it.
“I asked ‘Who was the singer?’ and he replied that it was Andrea Boccelli. And I then asked what Trimble had said when handed the CD.
“He said ‘That man is no opera singer… he’s nothing but a popular performer’.”
And Mark laughed uproariously as he recalled that exchange.
As you may have already guessed, there are at least a couple of Mark Durkans.
There is the serious, often intense politician whose grasp of detail is legendary, and then there is the private Durkan who can be hilariously funny.
However, what is beyond clear is that Durkan was a huge political player for many years, first as an advisor and constituency worker for John Hume, then as chair of the SDLP, soon followed by election to the Assembly, then Deputy First Minister and later Foyle MP and leader of the party.
Born in 1960, Durkan was only 10 months old when his father, an RUC inspector, was killed in a road accident.
The family, then based in Armagh, moved back to Derry, the home place of both his parents, and he was raised with his six siblings in the Pennyburn area of the city.
He says there was no particular emphasis politically that he can recall growing up, except that he remembers when local businessman Luke Hasson stood as an independent against the unionist candidate and he was – aged about seven – engaged to stir the paste to be put on the election fly-posters.
He added: “I remember too around that time hearing the names Gerry Glover (then the hardline unionist leader of Derry Corporation) and Gerry Fitt and I thought gerrymander was just another man’s name.”
But, young as he was, he knew the times they were a changing.
The Pennyburn area was growing rapidly, so much so that the local St Patrick’s PS had to become a dual school – they could only accommodate some kids in the morning and then others in the afternoon.
Housing, facilities and infrastructure all across Derry were totally inadequate for the city’s growing nationalist population.
And resentment about the sectarian policies of both the city corporation and Stormont was at boiling point.
A few short years later, Bloody Sunday was to prove the point of no return.
Against this background the young Durkan was sent to St Columb’s College, to be followed by entry to Queen’s University in Belfast.
Whilst studying politics and philosophy he got involved in the students’ union and he later moved to Dublin when he became vice-president of the Union of Students in Ireland.
His claim to fame here is that he shared a house with the president of the union at the time, a man who went on to become one of the most famous broadcasters in Ireland, Joe Duffy.
By this time he was looking around at what was happening, so he was up for a change in direction.
“In the 1980s the hunger strikes were on, and politics getting way more divisive, more polarised. I remember thinking whatever criticism you had of the SDLP – maybe they were not red enough, or not green enough – they were, at least, giving reasoned arguments for their positions.
“I had become involved with some people active in the party back then so I took a sabbatical in 1983 for a couple of weeks to help out John Hume as he ran for the newly-created Foyle constituency.”
It was, he admits, nothing serious in terms of a career plan. He really only did it for the experience.
“I didn’t expect anything to emerge from that but sometime later, I was back in Dublin when I got a call at our cramped little office and I remember Joe Duffy handing me the phone saying Hume was on the line looking for me. He asked me to meet him later than evening at Dublin Castle where the New Ireland Forum was meeting.
“I presumed he wanted me to make a submission on behalf of USI or something like that.
“Anyway, after getting past very tight security, I met John on the stairs and he started to show me the splendour of Dublin Castle, pointing in particular to a big chair which he said was King Billy’s throne. And then he said, ‘Judging by the size of that chair, he must have had a huge arse’, so it wasn’t exactly the normal guided tour.
“He also introduced me to another senior figure in the SDLP, Austin Currie, who was one of the founders of the civil rights movement, and then someone came up to John with a bunch of papers and he hurried off. I was sort of left standing. Austin Currie must have noticed, because he turned round to me and remarked, ‘You’ll have to get used to that working for John.’
“He had let the cat out of the bag, that I was being offered a job.”
Durkan started working for Hume on St Valentine’s Day in 1984, and maybe it was appropriate as there was already a young woman working there, Jackie Green, who was to become Mrs Mark Durkan some years later.
He quipped: “I always said to John he was good at working relationships.”
As previously mentioned, Mark grasp of detail is phenomenal, and it was to prove a massive asset to the SDLP during the torturous negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement.
Hume might have done the big picture strategy, but the detail was often left to his young acolyte. Hume openly admitted this on several occasions.
So, was it he who came up with the concept of First Minister and Deputy First Minister?
“Yeah, that’s true. It is the curse of the architect, having to work within something you designed yourself.
“The reasoning here was that the two leaders would be accountable to the Assembly. I didn’t think it was a good idea that people were appointed to office, but that they should be elected by the Assembly members.”
So, how did he find working with Trimble?
“He could blow hot and cold, could go from grumpy to giddy in seconds, and vice versa. He was gauche, temperamental. But, to be fair to him, he was operating under awful pressure.
“I remember sometimes he would disappear off to London for days and I wasn’t happy about that. I wondered was he interested at all in what we were trying to achieve at Stormont. I only learned from him some months before he died that the reason he went to London so often was to keep his MPs on board. They were the real power-brokers in the UUP.”
And Paisley?
“When I was minister for finance I had to deliver this budget and it was touch and go if it would get through because the unionists weren’t happy. Paisley asked to speak to me, told me he had to take Eileen (his wife) to a function and if he got back in time he would support it. Obviously, if he didn’t, the whole thing was going to collapse.
“So, everyone kept wondering why I kept talking for hours that day. I had to wait until he came back into the chamber. And as John said to Secretary of State Patrick Mayhew years before, he was certain Paisley would cut a deal if he could be ‘Number One’. That was Paisley.”
And what about his mentor, Hume?
“He was so driven, so creative, and he had the great gift of being able to work with a whole host of very different people.
“He built up a massive rapport with Irish America – Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Daniel Moynihan, Chris Dodds, Governor Carey etc. He had a great relationship too with the Irish Embassy staff in Washington which was led by Jim Sharkey, a Derry man.
“He built relationships with Charlie Haughey, Garret FitzGerald. He was instrumental in getting British Secretary of State Peter Brooke to say publicly that Britain had no selfish or strategic interest in the island of Ireland. And his role with Gerry Adams and Fr Alex Reid in bringing about the ceasefire and peace is a matter of historical record.”
Durkan lost the Foyle seat to Sinn Féin in 2017. When asked if he thought that Hume’s embrace of Sinn Féin was the catalyst for the SDLP’s electoral decline, he refused to engage on that.
“I don’t go for this ‘woe is me’ analysis. When the talks for the Good Friday Agreement were at their most intense, Sinn Féin swung all the media and political attention on to themselves in a very clever way. Would the republicans agree to peace? Would the IRA disarm? Would there be a split? They played it for all it was worth.
“All the attention went to them and it gave them a platform to build their party, which they did. That’s reality. That’s politics.”
While Durkan is no longer engaged in active politics, his contribution to the peace process has been widely acknowledged by many of the key players. His integrity, intellectual ability and civility have also been recognised.
Behind the scenes he’s now active in promoting the Hume Foundation, which was established to inspire and support leadership through peaceful change.
However, it would seem he’s unlikely to return to front line politics any time soon.