coalition administration. The SDLP joined the Executive along with the pro-power-sharing wing of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Alliance Party. The Executive would be short-lived. It collapsed after five months at the end of May 1974 following the Protestant workers Ulster Workers Council strike. By 1977 Devlin felt that the SDLP “was being stripped of its socialism and being taken over by unadulterated nationalists”. These differences came to a head when Devlin resigned as chairman of the parliamentary group and issued a statement criticising the direction of the SDLP. A few days later the SDLP executive met and voted to expel him from the party. In 1978 he established the United Labour Party, which aimed to be a broad based Labour formation in Northern Ireland. He stood under its label for the European Parliament in 1979 but polled just 6,122 first preferences (1.1% of those cast) and thereby lost his deposit. Devlin did not support the hunger strike and the campaign for political status for Republican prisoners. He was re-elected as an Independent Socialist to Belfast City Council in the 1981 local elections but with a much reduced vote of 1,343; down from the 7,087 votes he won four years earlier. In 1987 he, together with remnants of the NILP and others, established Labour '87 as another attempt at building a Labour Party in Northern Ireland (LPNI) by uniting the disparate groups supporting labour and socialist policies but it too met with little or no success. In 1985 he lost his place on Belfast City council. Devlin was also involved in the Peace Train Organisation. Devlin suffered from severe diabetes and throughout the 1990s suffered a series of ailments as his health and sight collapsed. Political beliefs John Hume and others supposedly saw Devlin as too forgiving of police, but not the British Army, as Devlin supported a motion tabled at the SDLP's annual conference in 1976 for British withdrawal. The motion, also supported by Ivan Cooper, Seamus Mallon, and Paddy Duffy, but opposed by Party leader Gerry Fitt, John Hume and Austin Currie, was defeated by 153 votes to 111. Devlin also spoke out against the assassination of Irish National Liberation Army chief Ronnie Bunting in 1980, commonly attributed to an Ulster Defence Association hit squad, but which Devlin always believed was carried out by an 'SAS type' unit with British Security force involvement. Devlin was a lifelong