He did not stand in 1985, but was elected to the same council in 1989 for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
[1] He resigned from the SDLP to stand as a Labour coalition candidate for the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996.
[2] With seven other leaders of Forum groupings that had supported the Good Friday Agreement, he won the Harriman Democracy Prize of the National Democratic Institute in 1998.
Under this label, he failed to take a seat standing in South Down at the 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly election, winning only 1% of the first preference votes.
[4] Curran stood as an independent at the 2003 elections to the Assembly, but saw his vote drop to 0.4%.