In my humble opinion, the SDLP are the very best of people. Champions of peace and dialogue through those dark years when there wasn’t much of either in evidence. While John Hume is as close as our political system gets to Gandhi: An unrelenting voice for reconciliation and progressive politics.

Now aged 82 and having withdrawn from public life, the party he shaped in his image has simply never recovered from his departure. By working to encourage republicans into the political fold he effectively invited Sinn Féin to his kitchen table only to watch them sit down and eat the SDLP’s lunch.

I have no doubt that Hume knew exactly what he was doing. Sinn Féin’s rise would come at the SDLP’s expense. His colleagues then made that most frequent of political mistakes: they failed to plan for Hume’s succession. Without his enormous moral presence, the SDLP has fallen on hard times. A succession of leaders – good people but without his star quality – have struggled to renew the party’s purpose.

Outpaced and outspent by a sharper, more disciplined Sinn Féin machine, the SDLP’s final humiliation came at the last general election when they lost their remaining Westminster seats to Sinn Féin, including Hume’s old powerbase of Foyle.

The question the SDLP has wrestled with for twenty years is what purpose would they go on to serve once the Good Friday Agreement was settled?

Today, after months of on-off, ‘will-they-won’t-they’ speculation, we get the answer: They are throwing their lot in with Fianna Fáil. It’s safe to say a giant panda with erectile dysfunction could have consummated this arrangement more speedily. Talks have been going on for months, which is strange given what is set to be announced is so meagre.

Not a merger – definitely not that – as both sides are eager to stress – but a ‘partnership.’ Of course, this is code for ‘we can’t agree on a merger’ which, without being uncharitable, locks instability into this strange endeavour from the very start.

For the SDLP, it sends out the signal they are ‘distressed stock’ – the political equivalent of HMV – looking for any deal that spares them from terminal decline. For Fianna Fáil, it may provide them with a symbolic 32-County presence, but there seems little prospect of doing much to dislodge Sinn Féin’s dominance of the nationalist and republican voting constituencies.

And why launch weeks away from local elections? The timing stinks. Even though we are led to understand Fianna Fáil isn’t running joint candidates, they will be tarred if the SDLP fails to make headway. They are both on a hiding to nothing and it would have been smarter to delay any announcement until after May.

The risk for FF is that they end up with the same fruitless result as the Conservatives, when they attempted a similar partnership with the UUP at the 2010 general election.

So what else could the SDLP have done to regain its mojo?

Perhaps the party should have moved leftwards and tried to build a class-based, cross-community approach? But the SDLP is also, in its marrow, a Catholic party – which is reasonable enough – but the prospects of winning over new support among unionists seems implausible.

Rather than team-up with FF, perhaps the smarter move would be to wait and see what happens with Peadar Tóibín’s new outfit, which is, by all accounts, gaining a lot of interest among that third of Irish voters who opposed repealing the Eighth Amendment.

Given the political establishment in Ireland has left many of these people politically homeless, Tóibín may yet represent a new, disruptive force in Irish politics and make a better fit for the SDLP.

Of course, a Martian political scientist might wonder why the SDLP doesn’t horizontally integrate with Sinn Féin rather than vertically integrate with the Soldiers of Destiny. There is little love lost with the Shinners for a whole host of reasons, but this underscores the problem for both the SDLP and Ulster Unionists in that there are only so many votes to harvest from their side of the electoral aisle.

Having been such a force for good for so many years, it’s sad to see the SDLP atrophy and then flail around, but I have to say, this move feels like a classic false dawn.