The Irish Government must begin planning for a Border poll and establish a dedicated ministry in the Republic for a “New Ireland”, SDLP leader Claire Hanna has told her annual party conference.
A year after being elected party leader, Ms Hanna accused Dublin of failing to provide leadership on unification.
“My call is simple. To the Irish and British governments – now is the moment to begin planning for the future,” she told delegates at a Belfast hotel on Saturday.
“Give a New Ireland the focus it deserves with a new ministry in the south, create a structure for all-island dialogue. Make the space where an informed debate on our constitutional future can be made openly, honestly, and fully.”
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As the main opposition party at Stormont, Ms Hanna also used her speech to round on the Northern Ireland Executive, which she said was “allergic to responsibility” and “holding back progress”.
Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Irish Labour Party leader, Ivana Bacik, also attended the event, with Mr Varadkar insisting he had not given up hope that the Dublin Government was committed to its election pledges on a united Ireland.
Among those in the audience for a debate on “reframing the New Ireland” was former loyalist paramilitary David Adams – invited to the conference by Ms Hanna – who took part in the political negotiations that led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement. In an interview with The Irish Times last month he spoke of his support for unification, the first senior loyalist figure to do so.
Delivering her speech to a packed conference room, Ms Hanna said she did not want to set an arbitrary deadline for a Border poll.
[ Did Brexit make a Border poll inevitable?Opens in new window ]
The Republic’s two main parties in Government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, she argued, “can’t keep denying responsibility for planning for constitutional change”.
“We’re not just a peace project to be managed and soothed. Many across this island are looking to Dublin for leadership that they have yet to provide.”
Acknowledging the Republic is “not a utopia”, she added that it, more than almost any country in the world, “has shown a true capacity for transformation”.
“For those who say it’s too soon, what exactly are we waiting for? What’s about to come in year 27, or year 30, of the (Belfast) Agreement that suddenly offers a better plan?” she said.
Unification will offer an opportunity to redesign public services and provide “the best of both systems for the benefit of all”.
It will create a “cultural superpower”, according to the SDLP leader.
Ms Hanna, the MP for South Belfast and Mid Down, said the North’s successes are “in spite of government here, certainly not because of it”.
“Yes, we have peace, but we don’t have reconciliation. Yes, we have North-South structures that are just going through the motions,” she said.
Citing public service failings in Northern Ireland – from spiralling NHS waiting lists to a housing crisis – and stalled government projects on Casement Park, the A5 road, and “our most precious natural resource”, Lough Neagh, which is “polluted”, Ms Hanna said the Executive “kicks big decisions into the long grass and never seems far from collapse”.
[ Mary Lou McDonald reiterates demand for Border poll ‘in this decade’Opens in new window ]
“By every meaningful metric, a child born here has worse outcomes than a child born in Dublin, London or Edinburgh. I firmly believe that it doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.
“ ... If the Executive is judged on these tests, it must be judged a failure.”
Her party wants to create a “culture of accountability”, she told the room.
“To draw some lines between actions, inactions and their consequences in people’s lives. That government has to do more than just exist.”
