Seamus Mallon obituary

Seamus Mallon, who has died aged 83, was deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland from 1979 to 2001, and later deputy first minister of Northern Ireland (1998-2001) in the power-sharing executive under David Trimble. He had a burning sense of duty which drove him into political life but equally a sense of loss of what life might have been without Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

With his puritanical intellectual honesty, albeit tempered by a fine sense of humour, he could be difficult to work with, something experienced both by John Hume as leader of the SDLP and Trimble as leader of the Ulster Unionist party (UUP). Hume made SDLP leadership more difficult by often excluding Mallon from decision making.