 Good morning everybody, both those of you who are in attendance here and those online. My name is Zahi Okalik, I'm the chair of the UK group in the Institute and it's a great pleasure to welcome Claire Hanna, the SDLP MP for South Belfast. Prior to that she represented South Belfast in the Assembly and before that on Belfast City Council. She's very prominent in the SDLP, it's difficult to turn on Northern Ireland television without some time seeing Claire on the television and it's a great pleasure to welcome you Claire and to talk about reconciliation and the future of Northern Ireland. Thank you, thank you for coming and thank you for the invitation and I think, I'm you'll agree that for the last decades the SDLP has very genuinely and in good faith given priority to reconciliation to the economy and to good government. We believe and believed always very very extensively and deeply in the values of 1998 and that the Good Friday Agreement meant that we needed less nationalism and not more but I'm hoping to set out to you today our belief that the same values and those same principles that have driven the SDLP for 50 years now lead us to very strongly assert that a fresh process for a New Ireland is the way to achieve those goals is the way that we can get towards reconciliation and prosperity. Those of us who do want to change in the North we know that those of us who want a New Ireland and inclusive New Ireland and New Ireland back in the EU we do have an obligation to spell out exactly what we mean and to put flesh on the bones of what we're lazily and glossily calling the conversation at the moment we have to start explaining what a new constitutional arrangement for the island might look like and crucially how we're going to get there. We know that we also have to look and talk and explain how we broach the subject of change in a region that hasn't traditionally been very good at listening to each other how we talk to each other as people and not merely as representatives of traditions or tribes how we move the conversation beyond this does your unionist friend take sugar phase that we're in at the moment making lazy assumptions about people's beliefs. We know that the journey to the New Ireland we're trying to create understandably prompts more anxiety than the destination itself and recent surveys have indicated that some 60% of people in the South and 68th in the North say that they fear the prospect of Irish unity could spark a return to violence former DUP MLA current DUP councillor Sammy Douglas in a book by Susan McKay from 2022 captures that point very well he said I don't fear United Ireland but I do fear the 10 years leading up to it but it is a fact that the stalemate and the stagnation in the North is very very much injecting dynamism into that conversation and driving interest in the new constitutional future. For our party through our New Ireland commission initially through over a few years quiet conversations of sort of multiple levels of dialogue that led to the Good Friday Agreement we've been trying to deepen that that conversation and to draw out some of the concerns and the thoughts that people have about how this might go. I know that the headline and the easy line is that Unionists won't engage but that's not what we're finding in those meetings some of them private and some of them not. We're finding questions of course but we're finding open minds as well. We're finding people who can read current events who can think about the future and what it means for them for their businesses for their kids. At a public event we hosted in early September when Matthew Toul set out a lot of the thinking that I'm going to talk about today. The majority of the questions and good serious questions came from people of a Unionist background who are at various points on the on the unity curious scale. Like us many feel that it is entirely rational and fair to start to explore what our options are here particularly when and I love this to change but the optimism of the last few weeks is fading but particularly when even the status quo of devolution within the UK isn't available to people in the north and many are beginning to agree with us that in fact exploring these issues and exploring in New Ireland can be the driver of reconciliation and good government and not just a project that can only be embarked on after those aims are achieved. So many do and many don't share our serious and considered view that the three core divisions that are thwarting the north's potential in their sectarianism inequality and partition need to be tackled together and not just in sequence which is maybe the way many have approached it before. We know this isn't any sort of a quick fix to the very demoralising stalemate we find ourselves in and it isn't a knee jerk response to it either. We've thought about this very very deeply over these last challenging years and we also know that there are more questions than there are answers but we're very serious about answering them about answering what we mean when we say in New Ireland what do we mean when we say inclusive who do we mean when we talk about Ireland. To help explain we've published a document with six principles which will guide our engagements on this and which I'd like to set out to you this morning and Barry has a few copies of that document if anybody wants to take it home. The first principle that we commit to in that is reconciliation which we believe absolutely has to be a guiding force in building a New Ireland and yes, reconciliation is both a term that will need a lot more definition having become almost a cliche in 25 years of gesture swapping in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement. Most of us agree that Northern Ireland remains a very divided society. The peace process brought an end mostly to violent conflict and the agreement brought political institutions that were designed to accommodate and respect differences while hopefully reducing our sense of division and there have been many many positive ways in which our societies become less divided. It would be naive to pretend that ours is a reconciled place, reconcile either to the past or to the future or even just the complicated presence of living in Northern Ireland nor can we honestly say that we've reached a point where the two parts of this island and the different traditions that a share this island know and understand each other. Despite the undeniable progress we've made since the agreement every day friction gives us all endless opportunities to see and think the worst of each other in Northern Ireland to set each other's teeth on edge and to reinforce any of the old stereotypes that we have in mind and that might be one of the reasons why the most common one of the most common objections to talking about constitutional change comes from those who say sincerely say that we haven't yet completed the work of reconciliation that therefore we're simply not ready to have these conversations. Our party the SLP is I feel I can genuinely say more committed than any other to ending division in the north. We're not just trying to create a new tribe of other to rival that of nationalist and unionists we're trying to erode those divisions so we take it very very seriously when people suggest that talking about constitutional change is a barrier to reconciliation that it might set the region back that it's better to keep a lid on all that we take it very seriously but we respectfully disagree. We believe that the process of having this conversation and of building something new for this island in fact shaping something new that's already building itself and in fields like culture and and and in business needn't be a barrier to reconciliation it will itself be a process of reconciliation so I want to come back to the question I asked earlier what do we mean by reconciliation if it means anything it has to mean not an event or even a process but a way of living and a way of approaching the predicament of living in a place with a complex uneven history that's littered with trauma and injustice it means understanding it means accepting and to us crucially it means empathy maybe it means looking at where we can for the best at each other and not always assuming the worst understanding where somebody is coming from even if you don't agree in the slightest acknowledging the things that have shaped that view for them exercising that choice can be a challenge not least when when media social media and sometimes traditional media tempt us into reaction often overreaction when we see the demonstrations of insensitive insensitivity and lack of empathy that are almost every day in the north the flags the chance the commemorations the desecrations it takes a lot of effort not to leap to a fence or to the worst conclusions about each other but it also takes a lot of effort to pause and consider how our words or actions might be taken by others and not to just hop on the everyday merry-go-round of of of commentating and condemnation that passes for politics in the north a lot of the time that all requires empathy that's a particular burden we believe in those of us who seek to build a new and inclusive Ireland and one that the stlp has been serious about for for the decades of our existence we've put ourselves in difficult places we'll be at the cenotaph this sunday we were at difficult events for us commemorating partition last year we're in westminster every week in places that aren't necessarily the most comfortable for us but that allow us to say our experience in our interpretations aren't all the same but we know they're all part of this island's story there were opportunities not taken for sure in the post-good friday agreement years and for for various reasons and in various ways we failed to create a context where we can reconcile where we can empathize with each other many hundreds of thousands of people in the north do that every day unionists and nationalists and neither but the politics do not encourage it and so those that say talking about the future constitution is incompatible with their damaging to reconciliation they have to be asked why if our current arrangements are more likely to facilitate healing and reconciliation why is that not happening to date there's really no more logic to that position beyond changes challenging but like it or not relationships are changing in the north not not least through brexit i can't believe i got five minutes in without mentioning the b word but there it is we need to be past the position where the view that advancing constitutional change is implicitly or explicitly subversive and destabilizing if that's the case what is stabilizing so we have a particular obligation to show in word indeed the new the new island we talk about an advocate for is one where reconciliation isn't just a cliche but a founding principle and a way of living that doesn't mean complete in agreement on the past it doesn't mean complete agreement on the future either but what it does mean what it doesn't mean is you have your narrative and we live ours you sing your song and we'll sing ours thinking that way has absolved many in the north of that duty of empathy and at its worst it's allowed for trivialization of the past and present trauma paratrooper flags worn as capes and dairy of up the raw headbands worn at gigs and none of that is appropriate for a new island one reason why for most of its history northern Ireland struggled with winning the consent of the nationalist population was that few if any unionist politicians seemed to feel a duty of empathy to the minority that was created when that jurisdiction was and we are very clear that we have no interest in just reversing that mistake 100 years on just flipping partition and trapping a large minority that are unhappy with where they are the late David Trimble all of his life a convinced unionist uses no well lecture to give an account of the experience of non-unionists in the northern state it was he said a cold house for Catholics those words represented a small but important moment of empathy of looking at the past from someone else's point of view without conceding any point of principle task for those of us who want constitutional change is to explain how we have a broad vision for the future in which non-nationalists are included and integral that's why we place reconciliation and the duty of empathy at the heart of our work and at the top of our list of core principles that will guide us for the next years being guided by reconciliation leads appropriately to the next core principle I want to talk about which is embracing our diversity another word that's absolutely swamped in platitudes but it's core to everything that we want to build I proudly represent South Belfast one of the most diverse pockets of people on this whole island the number of people living in the north who have origins outside the UK and Ireland has doubled between 2001 and the census of 2021 although we still lag well behind Britain and the rest of the island I and my party are unashamedly supported of migrant communities on both sides of the border but also of the good that a more diverse and inclusive Ireland has done for us more diversity on the island frees us to think more creatively and generously about what we mean when we say the word Ireland and who we mean when we talk about the Irish the achievement of winning independence for most of the island was followed by what nearly everybody now accepts was the development of a state that was too conservative and too narrow in its concept of what Ireland and Irishness should mean but there's been a transformation as we see it from the south of the border not just in terms of economic performance but from a monocultural society to a multifaceted European society comfortable with the pluralism that comes from immigration and comfortable with the expansion of the concept of who can be Irish what rights a republic should guarantee and where citizens have supported those rights by referendum and acclaim it's far from perfect but it's worth acknowledging how far the republic has come in expanding its concepts of who belongs you can understand then how jealously many in the north look on when rights for women for lgbt communities for ethnic minorities have all been vetoed by things like the petition of concern and you can understand how artificial the constraints that allow that to happen feel to people I expect we might pick up and questions and answers the idea of amendments to the standing orders of the good friday agreement strand one institutions in order to reduce vetoes which my party fully supports but we'll also talk about the limitations of that policy a big challenge for those of us who seek to build a new inclusive Ireland is whether we can take the next and more challenging step of imagining a state that doesn't just accommodate but encompasses and celebrates particularly the british and unionist tradition yes achieving that is going to be a lot harder than aspiring to it but we're out there and we're trying it earlier this year and the sdlb held a new island commission workshop with 60 women through shankle women's centre 60 women from from the shankle road in belfast who came who engaged who talked about us they didn't we weren't pushing all it open doors but 100 of those women and an evaluation forum said that they would talk to us again so that they would participate in a workshop like that again the good friday agreement provides a model for us what we call in that document a foundation stone esteeming as it does the equal legitimacy of british and irish identities inside northern Ireland and of course the equal legitimacy of conserving the status quo and the union and of building something new so there's a legitimate debate about whether northern Ireland has it as it is now has truly delivered on the pluralist vision of the agreement and how a new island can do better with that we should be honest about the kind of change we're going to have to navigate over the next few years to make that happen without rehashing centuries of history although we all love to do that and it's true that for very large parts of irish nationalism and they've seen the role as winning self-government and then independence and building a nation that is distinct from britain and britishness for some and not all being not british is a big part of their identity but we're committed to a pluralist ideal of society that truly encompasses the continued presence of a large part of the british nation on this island and specifically a large number of people with continuing affinity to britain inevitably that's going to mean conversations about flags and emblems and anthems but beyond that it is going to mean those of us advocating change thinking creatively about how we see that continuing future for britishness and our relationship between the new island and the island next door it isn't enough to say that the legal fact of the agreement and its citizenship takes care of that question it hasn't been that straightforward for the vindication of the Irish identity in the north but it sets down principles and promises that we genuinely need to put into practice for example could an enhanced partnership between a new ireland act as a guarantor for continuing rights of british citizens could a new body explore mutual interest areas of trade migration and environment they are not properly provided for in the institutions that we have scuthing the need for continued partnership isn't just about practical cooperation but also demonstrating that we take seriously that commitment to partnership that we celebrate and want to preserve those bonds that we're not just trying to kick this oil of britishness off our shoes as quickly as we can if we're serious about embracing diversity as a core principle we need to be able to reassure british people in the north that things are precious to them will still exist and be esteemed in the new ireland but we should also be very and this is something to look forward to the things that we celebrate as britishness aren't just monarchy and military although that's often i must say what is served up and maybe one of the reasons people like myself don't feel a strong affinity to britain and britishness but it's also the bbc it's glass and brick it's decades and centuries of art and literature that does mean a lot to people and for many people many irish people north and south britain represents a place of tolerance a place of refuge a place where they were able to go and build a better life it represents social democracy to many people at a time when this island didn't none of our commitment to inclusive symbols pretends that after a successful vote for a new ireland nothing will change of course well or else why would we be going to all this trouble but making diversity a core principle of the new ireland isn't just an ethical fulfillment of the good friday agreement we believe that is a practical way to build a substantial and a sustainable coalition for change diversity doesn't just mean finding structures to accommodate british britishness it means reflecting on what we mean when we talk about irishness it means making those terms and compass concept encompass the british identity but also the northern identity which like every region on this island is different to to the others john you had famously talked about his own multiple layers of identity he was european british he was irish and evolster remove one he said and you reduce the others many of us share that mix of identities even if not quite in the same order or waiting as us you the advantage of EU membership was that it allowed for those multiple levels of identity of affinity it allowed for complexity and that's why the stlp for all these decades has been so fundamentally committed and protected to the european dimension so whatever happens the north of this island is going to remain a complicated place but we want to turn that complexity and that that's sometimes that ability for critical thought into a positive for the whole island so when we talk about diversity we don't just mean diversity of identity or creed but of opinion and perspective and if there's something we nordies can agree about ourselves is that we do have a distinctive voice and we like to use it quite loudly and as well as the i supposed movements you'd be aware of and the green and the orange we have had genuine moments of radical progressivism the enlightenment presbyterian intellectuals of belfast so prominent in the united irish men various manifestations of the belfast labour movement and of course the civil rights movement all of which the stlp draw our dna from ireland at its most inclusive means drawing strength from diversity we don't want in this conversation the north to be a pathetic and begging orphan wanting to be taken in by the south we have values and attributes and we believe that fiery belfast and a northern drive can be a big part of the debate and sometimes the descent and the things that we're going to need to create the parts of a new island that are genuinely new that radical lineage brings me to our third principle and one again it sounds simple but i'm going to explain how much we mean it is that nobody on the island should be left behind it's going to be no surprise that a party like ours with roots in civil rights and labour politics seeks chains not just for regions of identity and certainly not so that one group can claim a victory over the other we've always believed in the transformative power of people in pursuit of better more fulfilled lives a healthier population where more people can meet their potential that's why we mourn the absence of devolution that we've had for so many of the last six or seven years that's why we fought so hard to have devolution and have a place where people can in theory meaningfully change lives but 25 years after the agreement it would be a lie if we said that we are close to achieving those things with the arrangements we have now while the post 98 generations have grown up mostly mostly without the scourge of violence we haven't really transformed life chances through the opportunities that came to us through the agreement and devolution of course the economy has grown significantly since 1998 but it hasn't meaningfully closed the gap in GDP per head with the UK average and it has fallen very sharply behind the south and it hasn't found ways to seize the opportunities that have been there productivity is consistently the lowest of these islands and that's partly a reflection of the large numbers of people leaving school with no qualifications relative to the republic and the much lower proportion of further and higher and technical qualifications as research from the sri has shown it's in part because the relatively small layer of top achieving school leavers are followed by a shamefully long tale of people who leave school without any qualifications they're quite literally being left behind as high achieving young people very often move across the water and or elsewhere to find work after they graduate and all of that means we repeat the vicious cycle of failing to educate enough of our young people exporting a portion of those we do academically investing maybe a quarter of a million pounds in each young person's primary and post primary education and then sending them to London to build to build their industries and their economy and as well as that brain drain we do have a reasonableness drain many of the people who would who would think critically about what they're finding and politically leave and and set up their lives elsewhere and all of that prevents us from attracting enough well-paid jobs I don't list these statistics to score points and of course they don't ipso facto prove that things would be different in a new yearland but the republic we know does perform strikingly better around 40 percent higher on wages and productivity than the north skeptics of these arguments will point out that there's many areas outside Dublin that don't see that level of prosperity but many of those are in border regions which vindicates and the point that that it's not just the north where people are suffering from the illogical nature of the border and not just the north that would benefit from working to overcome some of those artificial divisions so our vision for leaving nobody behind is about addressing the persistent injustice of low achievement and low ambition and we know that despite the progress in the south many younger citizens are frustrated about particularly the cost of housing and the sense that the economy isn't being run for them and for their future building a new island the process of thinking about who we are and what we want is an opportunity to really set priorities for the rest of the century for all of us on things like climate and things like AI and things like how handling an aging population and to design a society that prevents presents a real opportunity for a decent a decent life and decent work and the best public services that process of renewal and and creation for the whole island is our fifth principle that that what we do will be led by citizens and we genuinely think that's a way to reconnect people in politics in a way that every region including the whole of the south needs. When was the last time you heard a serious discussion though in Northern Ireland about our long-term future I don't even mean our constitutional future I mean what things are going to look like in 2030 or 2040 or 2050 it never happens it's more than a decade since we've had an agreed program for government we know we don't have a government to create that plan politics is truly stuck in a literal and metaphorical sense and and no party and no group of politicians has done more to prevent that from being the case but it's true and the past invades the present and the future never arrives so being future focused and outward looking is our next core principle. Neither jurisdiction on the island has a defensible record when it comes to climate change and neither is on course to meet its obligation in this crucial policy area but you can't expect farmers in Monaghan to be part of an ambitious transition but not farmers in Fermanagh it simply won't work environmentally and and it's unfair so this New Ireland process as I say isn't about those battles of the past it's about the practical challenges of the future for all of us and the opportunities that arrive even if the assembly was up and running we don't believe the strand two institutions even if they were allowed to work and they haven't properly done really at any serious point in the last 25 years we don't believe they're adequate to deal with those many many issues that transcend the border that are so much further and deeper on than we were when we designed the Good Friday Agreement which is brilliant and principle but it is a an analogue agreement for a digital age and the needs of of running this island in any meaningful way have changed quite dramatically. So as well as being resolutely focused on the future the effort to build a New Ireland must be outward looking and internationalist we're proud to be the most pro-European party in the north and determined that young people workers and businesses get the huge advantages of re-entering the European Union and it is a challenge to other parties who say that they're pro-European in the north to be honest that the only meaningful way for Northern Ireland to get back into the EU is going to be through a New Ireland so it is by definition not a narrow nationalist project but an internationalist one that's going to involve reconciling not just the identities in both parts of of Ireland but the establishment of that close partnership with the UK so this work has to be based on hope for the future something that is very very missing there's an absence of hope for many reasons in the north beyond the hope that we might just with dup conversion or a negotiation get to have more storming forever and ever and that unfortunately does not make the heart thing of many people who are interested in a long-term better life in Northern Ireland and it doesn't explain just getting back into storming it doesn't explain how we're going to make things different than the stop-start dysfunction that we've had for the last quarter of a century we're going to be honest with you today and and over the next few years that we don't have all the answers right now and that is our sixth principle hope with honesty much work is being done on a on a piecemeal but an ongoing basis largely academic about how our respective economies and public services work right now but also how they don't work for many years it was argued that the NHS was going to be the prohibitor of constitutional change because people wouldn't give that up the NHS at the moment for many people in the north is the right to join a waiting list and many people don't see it much much much beyond that we look at things like we look at the principles of the health service in the north and we look at the possibilities and the functionality of the health service in the south and we believe that something new can be bigger and better than the sum of its parts and that's something we want to be part of creating it's important that we understand the complexity of managing change on that scale and that we're honest about them we're not repeating the brexit mistake of pushing through change based on glib distortions but what does hope with honesty mean in this context there's a very live debate among economists about the subvention in the north how that is calculated which is relevant because the different forms of of spending are different for different parts of the UK and things like defence and diplomatic spending that are that are allocated in the in the in the block grant being an obvious example but whatever figure is chosen we're not pretending that Northern Ireland is substantially subvented it is in fiscal deficit and it will be for many years to come but it is also honest to acknowledge that that is itself a symbol of the failure yes regions will always be supported by capitals but if that is all the ambition that we're allowed to have for our economy that we get to just maybe have a bit more control on spending and the pocket money that we have we don't believe that is that is sufficient so it's entirely legitimate in conclusion that those who want the status quo to continue it's entirely legitimate that they claim that fiscal transfer is the reason but it's equally legitimate for those of us who want change to say that we can and will chart a path to better it hasn't been a an easy few years for the political tradition i represent new irelandsers who are anti-sectarian and who are serious about government and serious about the economy and with my colleagues most notably Matthew too who's work i've drawn on very heavily here we're hopeful and we are for the first time in years excited actually about what's ahead we sincerely believe that the time is now to move into a phase of applied thinking about how do we tackle tackle those three divisions and that's what i want to leave you with there are three multi-layered complex divisions they are sectarianism in in various parts of our society they're inequality between economic inequality and they are borderism on this island we don't believe they can be tackled one by one we don't believe any other movement or party is serious about each of the three of the mothers dip into one or two we want to work on that and we want to work with all of you to do so thank you very much