At Work She’s on Holiday: Introducing Claire Hanna

After surveying some of the Giants of the Irish political landscape, and while recognising that he has gestured towards her existence before, Macdara wants to explain why he has chosen Claire Hanna as his next subject. In short, the present writer expects that Hanna, currently a lower-order saint in the Partitionist firmament, might find herself accorded a position as a Patron Saint one day, given the extraordinarily low quality of available polite nationalists in the Occupied Territories, since anyone with a half-portion of sense can see that being a polite nationalist is much like being a particularly comfortable armchair on the Titanic (readers must note that it is compulsory to work a Titanic reference into any piece about Belfast). 

Hanna inherited her seat from her mother; in Ireland seats are passed on within the family like a respiratory virus. And in fact Hanna has already passed on a seat to her husband, as the Belfast Telegraph reported in 2015:

New SDLP Assembly Member Claire Hanna has denied that she tried to hide the fact that the man replacing her on Belfast City Council is her husband.

Ms Hanna wrote a newsletter that made clear Donal Lyons – a long-time party activist – was married with two young children. But the glossy leaflet circulated in her South Belfast constituency made no reference to the fact that he is married to her, though they are pictured together beside the article.

It must just not have seemed relevant to mention that the mother of his two young children is the woman in the photo, the one giving him a job? Let us note that in the Occupied Territories, the edifice of Democracy is held up with some quite miserable scaffolding: as well as compulsory multi-party coalitions, we find that elected representatives are replaced by a person of their choosing, to de-risk the vagaries of actual Democracy, in which the people would have a say in these things and might replace an SDLP representative with someone from a different party, something that would be Unfair—and remember that Unfairness in matters political is one definite step on the short road to Violence.

On her rise through north-eastern politics, we see some familiar milestones: castigating the memorialising of anticolonial militants; taking an Oath of Allegiance to a foreign colonial monarch as well as the monarch’s “heirs and successors”; letting everyone know that she raised concerns in a respectful letter the following day about the Oath that she had already taken; supporting inter alia Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party (who, remember, are all registered as distinct parties).

Hanna now sits in the English parliament, where, presumably during long debates about local matters—local to England, that is—she has memorised the constituency of each person there, allowing her to be understood in locutions such as “I thank the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North”. Macdara pictures her like an excited chorus girl clutching the programme to learn the names of the stars she sees around her. It will be appreciated that she has learnt who is honourable, right honourable and learned. She is happy to make reference to “other regions of the United Kingdom” and to “her majesty the queen”, in which phrase one is sure she pronounces carefully all the Capital Letters that Macdara cannot bring himself to write. 

She would placate those who have sent her to London by raising her part of Ireland—or her part of the United Kingdom, as she would have it—during debates on topics such as Planning Decisions: West Cumbria. The English politician’s response in this instance: “I appreciate the hon. Lady’s position. If she will forgive me, I shall not be drawn into the question of Executive formation in Northern Ireland”. The people of Belfast South, or at least that share of the people who have sent Hanna away to this Imperial Pantomime, can go to sleep happy that she is carrying out her work. The rest of us can look at her and be certain that an abstentionist would accomplish more.