We live in a world in turmoil, dominated by extremely ugly political leaders: right-wing megalomaniacs like Donald Trump, warmongers like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, fascists and authoritarians like Marine Le Pen and Victor Orban. So it is a breath of fresh air to meet a hard-working, high-speed social democratic politician like SDLP leader Claire Hanna.

I met Hanna last month in her office in Belfast. She breezed into the room full of chat and energy, although it was a Friday and she was clearly exhausted after a hard week in Westminster, leading her diminished party and working her South Belfast constituency. She told Seanín Graham of the Irish Times last October that she worked “silly hours,” but tried her best to maintain some semblance of a work-life balance in order to spend time with her three daughters, aged seven to 12. “Many’s a time I would fly home from London to Dublin because the last flight to Belfast is at 8 pm but you can get one to Dublin at 10 pm. I get the Aircoach up and get in at 1 am because I want to be there for school the next morning.”¹

She is both a pragmatic politician who wants the best for the people of Northern Ireland and an idealistic nationalist who is confident that there will be a united Ireland – or a ‘new Ireland’ – in her lifetime. However she insists that the North’s problems can’t be solved by “having a Border poll tomorrow.”

“If you’re getting a piece of work done on the house, do you want it done quickly or do you want it done properly?” she told the Irish Times. “And I feel the same about a Border poll. I feel like we are extremely limited by being a part of the UK. I really do. I feel that more and more every day. Even with a Labour UK government, who are more interested in Ireland and more respectful of Ireland, we are still low down on the list of priorities. It feels like a straitjacket.”

While paying tribute to the work of the group of academics around ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South), she also says she wants to see some authoritative research on the economy of a united Ireland. “At the moment one economist says it will be a disaster, another says it will be milk and honey.”

She still spends as much of her limited leisure time as she can in Galway – where she was born when her father, later to become the SDLP’s general secretary, was working for Údarás na Gaeltachta (her mother would become an SDLP MLA). She quotes the historian Diarmaid Ferriter on the South’s “rhetorical empathy” with the nationalist North while not wanting to get into the “meat and bones” of its problems. However she also believes that the Republic, having successfully managed huge social change – including dealing with major migrant inflows and passing abortion and equal marriage referenda – is well capable of handling the even greater upheavals that constitutional change will bring.

She is strong on reconciliation (with some caveats), pointing out that it is the number one principle in her party’s 2023 New Ireland Commission’s list of principles. However she emphasises that “it’s not an either/or, reconciliation or unity. There are those who hold reconciliation up as it it were a Trojan Horse, a blocker to unity. We’re absolutely not among those. Unity is not worth having if it’s not based on reconciliation, as Seamus Mallon stressed in his memoir, ‘A Shared Home Place’. It would be hard to see how unity would be successful without it.

“However reconciliation has not been achieved in the present constitutional arrangement, so it’s also fair to ask if it hasn’t materialised at this point, should we not try it in the next stage? You can’t say ‘everybody must be reconciled’ before we’re allowed to open the gate to that next stage. It’s not an either/or: reconciliation and empathy are a way of living your life and a way of approaching politics and change. Reconciliation has to be at the core of constitutional change and will be at the core of it for the SDLP. We emphatically don’t share Ireland’s Future’s analysis that reconciliation comes later and will magically occur in the next constitutional dimension. We think they must happen in parallel.”

She is a strong supporter of Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative (again with caveats). “A ‘new Ireland’ must be about improving people’s lives and Shared Island is actively delivering that”, she says. “But it is important that we don’t get into a narrative where Shared Island is the end.”

She would like to see more meaningful cooperation – including shared budgeting – between government departments, North and South, while wondering if “Shared Island can constitutionally even do those things.” She worries that the North-South structures set up by the Good Friday Agreement are not being properly utilised, while the North South Ministerial Council is “much less than the sum of its parts.”

Hanna strongly dislikes the SDLP being compared with Sinn Fein. She told the US-based political scientist Padraig O’Malley in 2023: “Sinn Fein’s narrative is that it was appropriate to bomb and kill to get a united Ireland. While that odour is in the air, you can understand people being uncomfortable about moving towards such a united Ireland. Unfortunately the IRA have made a lot of people associate Irish unity and the Irish Republic with death.”²

“The SDLP doesn’t exist as Sinn Féin’s little sister, we don’t orbit around Sinn Féin. Yes, we attract people who never vote Sinn Féin – not that they’re virulently anti-Sinn Féin, it’s because we have our own separate world view.” Her party, she argues, is offering something unique in its approach to tackling what it defines as the three main challenges for the North: sectarianism, inequality and partition.

Part of that uniqueness is its combination of pragmatism and idealism. She quotes the SDLP’s Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Matthew O’Toole, outlining the kind of practical and specific policies the party would follow if it were in government: things like a costed hospital waiting list strategy; a target to reduce childcare costs by 50% by 2030; a commitment to removing the ability of one party to collapse the political institutions; delivery on the targets set out in the Climate Change Act; the creation of an independent Environmental Protection Agency; and ‘stand alone’ hate crime legislation to tackle continued sectarian division and intolerance in Northern Ireland.

Last week Hanna raised the vital issue of policing, seen for many years as the real success story of the post Good Friday Agreement period. She said this progress was now seriously endangered. She asked for the reintroduction of 50:50 Catholic and Protestant recruitment to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, one of the key reforms recommended by the Patten Commission in 1999, which was scrapped in 2011 (Catholic representation in the PSNI is currently 32%).

She wrote in the Irish News that “the optimism and possibility of the Patten reform has ebbed away, through neglect by inadequate resourcing, failure to deal with the past, weak authority of the Policing Board and the persistence of operational and cultural relics within the PSNI”.³ She said legacy issues had made for a difficult environment for the police service, which was “constantly pulling resources and headlines back to the past…Truth and disclosure are blocked and the hostile environment compounded by PPS [Public Prosecution Service] decisions in relation to Operation Kenova.”

Hanna said current PSNI numbers are “inadequate for maintaining public safety and tackling crime effectively,” adding that stretched resources “make public confidence almost impossible to maintain. The rule of law suffers, recruitment becomes ever more challenging and the cycle continues.”

She believed that there needs to be a “recommitment to the rule of law,” stressing that the Good Friday Agreement had “acted decisively on issues of law, order and justice around which conflict had revolved, with interventions on policing, justice, rights and equality.There should be a review of what has worked so well since and why; interrogate the risks to the rule of law today and start the heavy work on its renewal.”

She also emphasised the importance of legacy.“The acid test is getting legacy right, based on the needs of victims and survivors, not the protection of perpetrators,” she said. “The temptation to ‘draw a veil’ is a mirage.” She praised current PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher as “the right leader and in the nick of time” but cautioned that “getting policing back on track isn’t a one-person job”.

Hanna has a wonderful head of curly, dark hair. “What unites the deeply sectarian loyalist and deeply sectarian republican trolls is a resistance to hair that isn’t straight,” she told the Irish Times, only semi-jokingly. “I could post, ‘the sky is blue’, and I could have five people saying, ‘brush your f***ing hair’. I know it sounds a bit chaotic, but I laugh and say I could build a peace process around mutual detestation of my hair.

“The point is, the people who are hateful, who are racist, who are sectarian, are usually misogynist as well. Bear in mind there is an epidemic of gender-based violence here – with 23 women murdered since 2020.”

¹ ‘New SDLP leader Claire Hanna: ‘We are extremely limited by being part of the UK. It feels like a straitjacket.’ 5 October 2024

² Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, p. 197

³ ‘SDLP leader Claire Hanna calls for a review of policing to bring it back to what Patten intended’, 2 April