Last Thursday, on BBC Northern Ireland’s The View, Claire Hanna turned her fire on the political settlement that has governed Stormont since the St Andrews Agreement of October 2006 — an arrangement that is, depending on the day, either cosily entrenched or barely holding together, propped up by the two dominant parties: the DUP and Sinn Féin.
Hanna set out what she called a package of narrow but high-impact reforms, arguing the institutions are long overdue a serious rethink. The pitch was a surgical strike on those elements of St Andrews that have embedded both parties despite multiplying failures in government — from undelivered roads to complete institutional breakdown.
She proposed three targeted interventions aimed squarely at the system’s most persistent fault lines.
The Three Reforms
The first concerns something that long irritated nationalists and republicans: the titles of First and Deputy First Minister. Hanna wants these formally redesignated as Joint First Ministers, stripping out the implicit hierarchy the current nomenclature suggests — a reform, notably, that Martin McGuinness himself once proposed.
The change would be symbolic, but the titles have been routinely weaponised to claim supremacy rather than reflect the co-equal reality the Belfast Agreement intended. That a job title can become a source of friction capable of destabilising an Executive says something telling about what was built at St Andrews.
The second proposal targets the position of Assembly Speaker, currently subject to parallel consent — a proven vulnerability. When those rules become a political football, the entire Assembly can be rendered inoperable before a single piece of law has been debated. Hanna proposes replacing this with a two-thirds majority threshold: a higher but more politically neutral bar.
Crucially, her model would allow the Assembly to continue sitting, drafting and scrutinising legislation even when the Executive collapses — something that has recurred with shocking regularity. There is no reason why the legislature should be paralysed by the same crises that periodically bring down the Executive. Why should Democracy halt because ministers walk out.
The third, and most structurally significant, proposal is the removal of the single-party veto on Executive formation. Under the current system, any one party can bring the entire edifice down by refusing to participate. Hanna wants that leverage gone, replaced by a framework that incentivises cross-community engagement rather than rewarding brinkmanship.
What is striking is how modest the reforms are in aggregate. The intention is not to sink the ship but to steady it — a targeted challenge to St Andrews’ most persistent fault lines, not a return to factory settings.
A Significant Break from Nationalist Convention
What makes this moment notable is not just the substance of the proposals, but who is making them. The SDLP and Sinn Féin, despite their long rivalry, have for decades operated within a broad consensus on the fundamentals of northern nationalism, differing more on tone and strategy than on substantive policy.
The two parties were bitterly divided on most major questions until the 1990s. In the post-Good Friday Agreement era, Sinn Féin came to lead nationalist opinion — viewed as the greener and more assertive voice — while the SDLP tracked a broadly similar constitutional destination by different routes.
Hanna is now staking out genuinely divergent ground. It is a significant departure, and a deliberate one: a signal that the SDLP under her leadership will not simply orbit Sinn Féin, but will offer a distinct political worldview — placing the party in direct and explicit tension with its main rival within northern nationalism.
Sinn Féin’s Convenient Reversal
The political irony is considerable. Sinn Féin’s current defence of the First Minister title represents a near-complete reversal of its prior position. The party that once found the hierarchy implied by the title deeply objectionable now constructs elaborate justifications for its preservation — the reasoning shifting seamlessly to accommodate changed circumstances.
That McGuinness himself once mooted the very reform they now resist renders the position not merely inconsistent, but self-defeating. It is a reminder that in Northern Irish politics, institutional principles tend to be inversely proportional to whether your party currently holds the top job.
Hanna’s intervention has cut through that with unusual clarity. Whether her proposals gain traction will depend on forces well beyond her control. But the fact that she has made them — publicly, specifically, and in direct contradiction of Sinn Féin — is itself worth watching.
Sinn Féin’s difficulty the SDLP’s opportunity?
The SDLP’s time in opposition has been largely quiet. The political oxygen at Stormont has been consumed by the fractious relationship between the DUP and Sinn Féin, punctuated by familiar rumours that the next institutional breakdown is already being quietly prepared. In that environment, the smaller parties have struggled to make themselves heard above the din.
Voters rarely reward parties for institutional housekeeping, however necessary. But Hanna’s timing may be fortuitous — a controversial MLA pay rise has angered the public, and the Economy Minister has endured a bruising week over a lost FDI jobs package, culminating in an uncomfortable interview on The View that will be very difficult viewing in her party’s press office.
That combination of circumstances creates an opening the SDLP has rarely enjoyed in the post-Agreement era. Sinn Féin’s difficulty could be the SDLP’s opportunity — but only if Hanna’s party can rediscover the killer instinct her party largely buried thirty years ago in the necessary, honourable, but ultimately self-effacing work of making the peace process function.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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