Claire Hanna MP: ‘Building something new’

New SDLP leader Claire Hanna MP talks to David Whelan about her plans to “freshen up” and “clarify” the party’s offering, her outlook on opposition, and her vision for a new Ireland.

“As a party we need to change how we do things, but not why we do things,” Hanna, the seventh and newest leader of the SDLP, told the gathering of party members at conference in early October 2024, immediately after being ratified to take up post from fellow MP Colum Eastwood.

“We will show people that what they have now is not as good as it gets, and that we are the party who will build something new,” she pledged, imploring herself and fellow party activists to “move up a gear” in efforts to grow the party.

Sat in her constituency office off the Ormeau Road, south Belfast, less than two weeks since delivering her speech and formally taking up the role of leader, the Belfast South and Mid Down MP outlines how she has sought to put her words into practice, having held meetings with the party’s eight MLAs and case workers across all 10 of the SDLP’s constituency offices in the North.

Hanna’s energetic and passionate approach to politics has seen her build a popular personal vote (she took 49 per cent of the Belfast South and Mid Down vote in the July 2024 Westminster election) which sits in contrast to party’s steady electoral decline over the past decade – a central reason to why Hanna’s nomination was unopposed and widely supported.

Hanna is steeped in SDLP pedigree. Her father is a former SDLP General Secretary while her mother was the first northern-born woman ever to serve in ministerial office in Northern Ireland. In this context, added to her own political rise from Belfast City councillor to MLA and then MP, ascension to leader now seems like the natural order for the Galway-born Hanna – an assertion she contests.

“I am a team player, and I enjoy the work that I do, so I have never been about racing ahead to the next thing,” she explains. “Leadership of the party was not something I was hankering for, but I was aware that it is an exhausting job and not something Colum [Eastwood] was going to want to do forever.”

“I am honoured to be taking on this job and leading this brilliant team,” she states.

Interestingly, Hanna does not come equipped with a radical plan to reform the party. This is in spite of successive bruising election cycles, which culminated in the SDLP’s failure to qualify for an Executive portfolio in 2022 and was compounded by falling behind the Alliance Party in local council representation in May 2023. Instead, she takes heart from the attendance at the party’s 2024 conference and points to a need to “grow the membership base, get more activists, and reanimate the party in some of the communities where we have not been active enough”.

“We had youth, vitality, and diversity in all of its forms in that room and it reminded me that most of us in that room were there because we believe very strongly in something. We believe that politics is not a soap opera or about self-enrichment. It’s about public service,” she says.

Outlining her belief that the concepts and values of the SDLP still resonate with a lot of people, and indicating her belief that the party has suffered electorally because other parties have successfully appropriated those values, she adds: “We need to connect our values to people and their lives and to demonstrate to them that the things we are doing.”

Hanna indicates that the context of “hopefully a period of stability and delivery”, with the next election some two years off, a functioning Northern Ireland Assembly and a “relatively benign” UK Government presents an opportunity to “get stuff done”. Asked to elaborate on what that looks like, she says: “It is about putting a bit more strategy on the things that we are trying to achieve in the Assembly, in Westminster, and in Dublin. I am committed to and compelled by the new Ireland conversation, and I want to freshen up, clarify the SDLP’s offering in parliaments, in councils, and in Dublin as well.”

Opposition

If successful, growth of its elected members in the Assembly would give the SDLP an interesting conundrum of qualifying for an Executive – which it believes has lacked the ambition to seize the opportunities that exist for the region – or remaining in opposition.

Hanna is not coy in her assessment that the party’s current position is a result of a failure to adequately connect to enough voters but believes that in opposition, the SDLP are afforded the opportunity to effectively scrutinise government, while acting as a voice for stakeholders in the public and private sector.

Asked if regaining an Executive portfolio was an ambition, Hanna says: “Let’s see. Most people enter politics because they want to change people’s lives. Very often the way of doing that is through the Executive but I do not think that has been the case in recent years. I do not think the Executive is maximising the opportunities that exist to improve this region.

“At the moment, we have the important and vital job of stress testing the Executive’s ideas and challenging the outcomes as opposition. If we do that effectively, and we grow our team, then we will think about what the possibilities are after the next election.”

Asked if she would consider leading the party from Stormont, Hanna says that such a move is not on the horizon. “I am trying to lead a movement that is going to deliver a new Ireland, and that is a project broader than Stormont. In doing so I need to be in Dublin, London, Brussels, and towns across this region. Stormont is really important, it is an important part of our new Ireland vision, and we want to make it work, but it is not the limit of our ambition.”

New Ireland

Hanna laments the fragility of the current Stormont institutions and has persistently called for reform of the mechanisms to provide a deterrent to parties collapsing functioning executives. However, she opposes the view put forward by some that a dysfunctional Stormont could hasten the pathway to reunification.

“For those of us who want a new Ireland, our job is to persuade sufficient numbers of people to also want that new Ireland. I fully accept that that is not the case at the moment and that people understandably want their basic needs met. They do not need people like me pretending that waving a constitutional magic wand will provide an instant fix.”

Hanna rejects the idea that momentum for a border poll brought about by Brexit fallout could be lost if not acted upon quickly. Opining that the numbers currently do not add up for a border poll to be successful, she adds: “You do not create the type of modern, reconciled, and pluralist nation that I and the SDLP envisage by slipping past a border poll while everyone is losing their heads.

“You plan, you engage, you assure people, you understand the things that people are anxious about, and then you put mechanisms in place to reassure them.”

“Stormont… is not the limit of our ambition.”

Asked if she envisaged the New Ireland Commission – set up in 2021 by the SDLP with the intention of seeking “to engage with every community, sector and generation on this island to build new proposals that can generate a consensus on our future constitutional arrangements” – as the vehicle for that vision, Hanna says that the Commission is a very important part but not the sum of the engagement required.

“It is no secret that the SDLP is not an enormously well-resourced vehicle, and with all of the ups and downs of the last few years, we have had to pick up and put the commission down at different times, as in we have not been able to invest the time and the thinking in it that we would have liked. That is changing now.”

Hanna has advocated the reestablishment of the New Ireland Forum and says that she will be seeking support from southern parties following the upcoming general election in the Republic.

“Those conversations around how our public services and economies, for example, might converge, are crucial. They are happening to some degree through the likes of university research, but we need a level of coordination to accelerate and deepen those discussions for people.”

Hanna’s ambition to “build something new” – the slogan used at the party’s recent conference – is an acknowledgment that both jurisdictions must adapt and learn from each other’s success and failures. Commending the Irish Government’s Shared Island initiative as a positive mechanism for making and evidencing improvement in people’s lives, she says that the initiative has broadened engagement in the conversation and helps underpin the work of the New Ireland Commission.

“The status quo is limiting us, but constitutional change is not the purpose,” she explains. “The purpose is to create a fairer, more prosperous society, with reconciliation at its heart.

“We believe, in time, that a new Ireland will best make that ambition real. That change is not the ends, but the best means of improving lives.”

Political allies

With Hanna outlining a need to build consensus on an island-wide basis and beyond, she will seek to lean on relationships she and the SDLP share with parties in the Republic and in Britain. In August 2024, participating in a podcast with the BBC, Hanna admitted she had considered quitting the party over a failed official partnership with Fianna Fáil in 2019. Despite the partnership, Hanna canvassed for both Fine Gael and Labour representatives ahead of the 2020 elections.

Asked about the party’s political allies under her leadership, she says: “I think the SDLP does best for ourselves and for the people we represent when we are the common ground in democratic Ireland. It has served people well when we have had good relationships with whoever’s in government and whoever’s in opposition and I intend to keep it that way.”

Describing herself as a member of the “Labour family”, she admits that the Labour Party in the Republic has always been her party of choice but stresses that she has never advocated for an exclusive relationship for the SDLP and the party, instead believing the SDLP holds a “convening power” for social democrats on the island.

Turning to the ascension of the Labour Party in Great Britain, something many hoped would improve working relationships between Britain and the executives of both jurisdictions in Ireland, Hanna admits to being disappointed by “the lack of vision” and “sense of hope” for Northern Ireland.

“I think people desperately needed some sense of hope after 14 years on the Tories, and I do not think Labour have articulated that yet, which is worrying,” she says.

“While the UK Government still has very substantial influence in our lives, we will use every democratic lever that is available to us to get the best for the people we represent and to showcase the possibilities of Northern Ireland.”

Undoubtedly, the use of every lever will be necessary if Hanna is to steer the SDLP back to the electoral significance that it strives to. As she concluded her maiden leader’s speech to at the party’s conference, she quoted a Gaeilge proverb, saying: ‘Giorraíonn beirt bóthar’, meaning ‘two shorten the road’. Hanna has high-level ambitions. Ensuring voters join the SDLP on that road will be critical to the success of her leadership, but she carries the air of someone extremely confident in what they can achieve.

“We will show people that what they have now is not as good as it gets, and that we are the party who will build something new,” she reiterates.