Picking up the pieces: relationships after Brexit, with SDLP MP, Claire Hanna

Let's talk about relationships

Nicholas Allen, the Director of the Willson Centre at the University of Georgia, was joined in discussion by Claire Hanna MP, the SDLP MP for South Belfast, to talk about relationships on the island of Ireland and between the island and Great Britain following Brexit. Is it time for the Good Friday Agreement to be revisited? Is the Northern Ireland Protocol under the Withdrawal Agreement the final layer of protection for the Union? What will the relationship between Northern Ireland and the European project look like going forward? Is the Protocol being used as a political weapon? And we discuss denominational education and the viability of a border poll in the near future.

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• Executive Summary
• About the speaker and discussant
• Watch the conversation
• Read about the main points from the conversation

Executive summary

Nicholas Allen and Claire Hanna MP question the future of relationships across the island of Ireland, between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and between Northern Ireland and the EU in the post-Brexit environment.

• Claire Hanna suggests that the Good Friday Agreement isn’t just a set of rules for a particular point in time, but a genuine framework or ‘toolkit’ for all relationships. These relationships are necessary for managing the issues that don’t stop at borders.
• The Agreement isn’t static but is something that can evolve to help move Northern Ireland throughout the next decade. It’s not about ‘sharp edges of sovereignty’ but about finding ways of working that are based on mutual trust.
• Northern Ireland focuses too much on who does politics and too little on what they want to achieve. Big policy decisions on Brexit, climate, etc are being decided for Northern Ireland instead of by Northern Ireland.
• Making Stormont work is necessary before Northern Ireland can even begin to discuss the constitutional question – it has to prove it can make Stormont work.
• Having a position on the constitutional question doesn’t have to be sectarian – both believing in the Union or believing in a new united Ireland can be rational positions.
• The Protocol offers an opportunity for Northern Ireland to remain both British and European, a privilege that most of the UK has lost with Brexit. It shouldn’t be weaponised and should instead be embraced as having many positive pathways leading from it. Hanna thinks the government will regret politicising the issue rather than building a positive vision.
• Northern Ireland's future must stay within the orbit of the EU. It is impossible to think of it outside of it.
• Regardless of whether Northern Ireland ever unifies with the Republic, it will always remain next-door neighbours with Great Britain and therefore it’s a relationship that is worth working on and maintaining.

About the speaker

Claire Hanna is an SDLP Member of Parliament for South Belfast, elected in December 2019. She has been actively representing South Belfast since 2011 as a Belfast City Councillor, then as an MLA in the NI Assembly until her election to Parliament in 2019. In the Assembly, she served as vice chair of the Finance Committee as well as on the Public Accounts Committee and the Environment Committees. She chaired Assembly All Party Groups on International Development and the Arts. In Westminster, Claire serves as a member on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. Her professional background is in international development, latterly in a policy and education role.

About the discussant

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center at the University of Georgia and holds an endowed Professorship in the Humanities. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.

Watch the conversation

What was said?

Claire began her intervention by talking about the Good Friday Agreement.

Solutions to Northern Ireland’s problems are ‘all about relationships’ and the Agreement provides a ‘genuine framework’ for all relationships on the island of Ireland. Such relationships are necessary for managing policy challenges that don’t stop at political borders. It’s important that we don’t think about the Good Friday Agreement as a ’relic of 1998’ but a ‘toolkit’ that can evolve to help Northern Ireland through the next decade. She explained how the language in the preamble to the Agreement reflects that of the Treaty of Rome – the 1957 agreement that created the European Economic Community – and therefore it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those who were (and remain) unsupportive of the Good Friday Agreement were also drawn to Brexit. Both agreements share an ideology in approaches to interdependence and common endeavour – an ideology that Brexit firmly rejected. The respective Brexit campaigns, according to Hanna, were always going to produce a perception of winners and losers. This was something the Good Friday Agreement intentionally tried to be ambiguous about.

In a post-Brexit world, relationships are important; Hanna thinks that for all its faults, the Good Friday Agreement hasn’t been bettered in terms of its basic concepts of partnerships and compromise, and as an architecture for power-sharing and protecting minorities. Whilst she insisted on the continuation of using the Agreement, Hanna argued the case for a ‘paradigm shift’ in other areas of Northern Ireland politics. In a ‘time-between-times’ that she compares to James Joyces’ Ulysses, she argued that now the pre-2016 stability isn’t an option, serious change is needed to snap Northern Ireland out of the habit of having its decisions made by Brussels and London. She suggested that a ‘major feature’ of politics in Northern Ireland was a lack of taking responsibility. As poor political decisions don’t have the same impact in Northern Ireland as they would in a normal political theatre, she thinks that politicians are content or resigned to endorse the habit of putting difficult decisions into a ‘governance black hole’ with either the executive or London.

The SDLP is a nationalist party and is openly planning and preparing for a ‘New Ireland’. Working on these relationships isn’t, however, a Trojan Horse for unification. Admittedly, it would help bring around a unified Ireland, but Hanna believes it would make Northern Ireland – if it stayed in its current political form – a more equal and harmonious place. A later question from the audience prompted her to make clear that the SDLP won’t be campaigning for a border poll in the elections next year. She argued that any constitutional change needs the consent of both traditional communities and wouldn’t be able to be slipped by in a period of chaos. Northern Ireland can’t expect constitutional change without engaging with Stormont. 

Following her intervention, Nicholas Allen asked Hanna to talk more about her career prior to her 2019 election and her experience growing up in Northern Ireland. She talked about her work as a Belfast City Councillor where she helped make it a living wage employer. She was also honest about the limitations, noting that she hadn’t overturned deprivation and now represents a prosperous constituency. Northern Ireland remains near the top of deprivation indexes, despite opportunities to address this through devolution. For her role as an MP, she wants Northern Ireland’s politicians to refocus on the economy and hold the crisis negotiations it did for Irish language laws for NHS waiting lists and the living wage. Hanna argued that voting patterns reflect this mentality – she thinks voters are tired of being used as ‘sectarian voting fodder’. Reflecting on her own identity, she admitted that she was often caught talking about Northern Ireland as a ‘problem child’ rather than the ’textured and appealing place’ that it is. There is a growing Northern Irish identity that isn’t just Irish dancing or marching bands.

Conversation turned to the Protocol, with Nicholas commenting that the period of 1998 to 2016 had felt the most secure period of the Union it its history with Irish nationalism feeling like it would never gain ground. He asked whether the Protocol offered the last protection of the Union under these terms? Hanna reflected that the EU allowed people to not compromise on their identity, one of the reasons John Hume saw its value for Northern Ireland. She also condemned those in the nationalist community who have seen Brexit as ‘rocket fuel’ for unification. Hanna argued that the Protocol offers a similar opportunity – to be European and British – and that people clinging to ‘outdated notions of sovereignty’ are the problem, not the Protocol.

On the future of the SDLP’s relationship with the European Project, Claire Hanna cannot see a future in which Northern Ireland is out of the Single Market and out of the orbit of the EU who she thinks have always been very supportive of the country. She personally is a ‘true believer’ in the project of European social democracy and pointed to the recent resurgence of this politically in Norway and Germany. She argued that the Protocol offered a real opportunity to move forward from Brexit positively and that politicians who had tried to politicise it would come to regret their actions if the opportunity was truly missed.

Questions from the audience covered denominational education, the future elections, and the Protocol. Hanna stressed that as much as segregated education did encourage a divided society, and that there is ‘no doubt’ it should be prioritised, education cannot really be addressed until segregated housing is. She also pointed to attempted reforms in the health service, and mirroring earlier comments on political reluctance for change, she argued that people are incredibly daunted at the prospect of a complete overhaul of schooling.