Claire Hanna is cooling off in the shade among a bed of wild flowers at Belfast’s Ormeau Park.
It’s a rare warm day in mid-September and less than three weeks since the South Belfast MP threw her hat into the ring to become the next SDLP leader.
She has just been filmed cycling up a hill for a party political broadcast that will air prior to her being ratified for the role. Afterwards, while being photographed in the city’s oldest municipal park, she jokes that the bike ride – filmed from the boot of a car by the SDLP’s videographer – “was all a bit sweaty and harried”. “Unfortunately the old gruaig has suffered,” she laughs, patting down her thick curls.
At the end of August, Colum Eastwood announced he was quitting as party leader after nine years. Eastwood, who will continue as Foyle MP, used his resignation speech to formally endorse Hanna as his successor, describing her as “far and away” the best option.
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Shortly after 4pm on Saturday , she is due to take to a stage in a Belfast hotel to address delegates as the party’s seventh leader at its annual conference.
She accepts the party has a “mountain to climb”. Once the dominant nationalist party in Northern Ireland and one that played an instrumental role in the peace process under John Hume, the SDLP has fewer Westminster MPs (two), Stormont MLAs (eight) and councillors (37) on local authorities in the North than it did a decade ago.
The 44-year-old Galway-born politician has, as one party veteran put it, “the SDLP in her DNA”.
Her father Eamon is a former party general secretary – he was the sixth person to pay his sub to the party following its foundation in 1954 and Hanna framed his receipt as a present – and her mother, Carmel, was an MLA and executive minister. Her husband, Donal Lyons, is a Belfast City councillor.
Only once has she ever, briefly, considered quitting the party, over the bitter internal dispute over Eastwood’s doomed partnership with Fianna Fáil in 2019 – “a wrench, like a family feud in ways” she recalls – yet, over a coffee in a craft beer bar on the Ormeau Road, she insists the leadership job was never on her radar.
“It wasn’t something I hankered after, it wasn’t something I was chasing or planning for,” she says.
As an MP, she spends about seven nights a month in London for her Westminster work and is “extremely busy all the time”.
“I like being busy, I get to do the things I like to do politically. I get to work loads on constituency issues. I get to attend the events I want to attend.
“I work very silly hours but I do have a semblance of work-life balance because family is extremely important to me.”
When Eastwood told her about his planned departure over lunch in Derry last month, she admits she wasn’t “completely shocked” because “no one can go on forever”.
“We talked about me replacing him and I wasn’t hostile to it. I had reservations. [SDLP Stormont leader] Matthew [O’Toole] was also in the frame and is very, very able. We had a conversation about it. I don’t think I’ve all the answers … but I strongly believe in what I’m doing.”
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? And I feel the same about a Border poll
The mother of three girls aged seven to 12, Hanna says they were her “number-one consideration”.
“It’s really hard to say these things without sounding twee, but they are the centre of my life and I thoroughly enjoy them. My concern was that I would have even less time with them.
“Manys a time I would fly home [from London] to Dublin because the last flight to Belfast is 8pm but you can get one to Dublin at 10pm. I get the Aircoach up and get in at 1am because I want to be there for school the next morning.”
At the same time, she “believes deeply” in making the North a better place for her children to grow up in.
“It’s not that I don’t want them to move away or limit their horizons, but I want this to be a viable city and region that they feel happy living in. And I don’t want them to have to grow up navigating things like sectarian geography.”
Hanna’s south Belfast constituency is the most ethnically diverse in the city and was at the centre of unprecedented racist violence and attacks on migrant-owned businesses last month.
She has lived in its leafier suburbs since she and her family moved from Bearna in Connemara shortly before her fourth birthday, and has, for the most part, escaped sectarian attacks. However, in 2012, when she was a councillor, the windows of her home were smashed during the protests over the flying of the union flag from Belfast City Hall.
Watching an episode of Derry Girls with one of her daughters recently, she realised how little her children know about the past.
“She asked, ‘Why where there soldiers here?’ She was really shocked to learn there had been a conflict here.
“It’s not something they know and you don’t want that to be part of their lives. I don’t mean sectarianism, I mean sheer dysfunction. I mean the fact we went years without a government.
“We’re not ambitious, and I don’t mean ambitious in The Apprentice sort of way, ambitious in the sense we limit ourselves, we limit our economy, we limit our public services, just by the fact, in part, that we go, ‘ah well, the Brits, they’re terrible aren’t they’ so we don’t bother changing things we can change ourselves.
“That is also limiting our potential in a new Ireland as well.”
I genuinely think opposition is a really important and honourable function in a democracy
Hanna was in attendance to support Eastwood and the former taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, in Derry late last month, as he laid out his thoughts on a united Ireland in a speech on behalf of the SDLP’s New Ireland Commission.
She bristles when comparisons are drawn between Sinn Féin and the SDLP in terms of their goal for a united Ireland.
“The one thing I would say is that the SDLP doesn’t only 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 worldview.”
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.
She is confident there will be a united Ireland or “new Ireland” in her lifetime but 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? 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.”
She also despairs at the escalation in misogynistic attacks across the political spectrum and points to the “substantial overlap” between sectarian and misogynistic online trolls.
“What unites the deeply sectarian loyalist and deeply sectarian republican trolls is a resistance to hair that isn’t straight,” she quips.
“I literally get tweeted pictures of hairbrushes.
“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.”
In such a busy life, Galway is her escape. It is “a real corrector”, she says.
The bungalow her parents bought in Bearna village in the 1970s, when her father worked for the Gaeltacht development department, is still there.
“I struggle to articulate it but I feel Galway is just like the mothership or something, it’s like the dock. Me and Donal and the kids are down at the house as often as we can.
“I love the atmosphere but I have tiny tinges of regret that there aren’t northern cities like Galway. Why isn’t Derry like Galway? Why doesn’t it have that self-confidence and sense of relaxation?”
For now, Hanna is embracing the party’s opposition status on the Stormont Assembly benches for the first time, led by her close colleague, MLA Matthew O’Toole.
“I genuinely think opposition is a really important and honourable function in a democracy; everybody else gets one. It helps stress-test ideas, it helps to break some of the groupthink that was linked to failure in the assembly.”
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Hanna acknowledges the scale of the task ahead but is also confident her organisational skills – her canvass team in the last Westminster election attracted more than 100 volunteers – will help re-energise the party.
“We are down electorally and there’s no pretending we’re not, but at the same time I’m focused on the elections of the future.
“We will organise better and get more boots on the ground in places they need to be. I’m not saying that organisation is going to fix all the problems but I’ve been around forever and it is something I’ve done.
“People who are still with the SDLP are doing it because they fundamentally believe in the project.”
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