“At that time, in those few months, I did think my time in elected political life was possibly coming to an end if that [partnership] had gone in the trajectory we and others thought it was going to.
“I thought deeply about where I fitted. I didn’t think that I fitted into any of the existing political vehicles that were around,” she told Red Lines.
“I was the only MLA who didn’t support the partnership but I wasn’t the only person. There were quite a few councillors and activists who didn’t.
“We did discuss what something might look like,” she added.
“I genuinely think that something like the SDLP, a party with a history, values and a heritage, should exist,” she told the podcast.
“If the SDLP disappeared into a Fianna Fáil vehicle, then that wouldn’t have existed”, she added.
In September 2022 the party signalled the end of the partnership, with party leader Colum Eastwood saying his party needed to stand on his own two feet.
“Things moved and changed. The institutions came back and the Brexit process jumped us on so, thankfully, that didn’t need to go anywhere but I did have to consider the possibility that my time in the SDLP was over,” she said.
“It was very difficult,” she added.
Ms Hanna said she understood why the party leader explored the partnership.
She said that 2019 was a “very bleak place for the SDLP”.
“We had no MPs. We had no MEPs because we were out of Europe. The Assembly was down. It looked like the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement might never come back. It was a bleak horizon.”
“It was the wrong thing to do but I think Colum Eastwood was trying to do something. It was the route that he thought possibly would take the party out of the place it was in.
“It wasn’t the right route but I can understand the circumstances it came from.”
In the aftermath of the announcement Ms Hanna quit as her party’s Brexit spokeswoman and stopped attending group meetings at Stormont.
She said she would have quit the party if the partnership developed.
“I didn’t think it was something that was going to work electorally and it turns out it didn’t,” she said.
“It’s worth saying this was a thought exercise. It’s just, if the SDLP doesn’t exist, do I have a political home and what they might look like?
Claire is clear in the interview that the idea was not progressed, but it shows the level of disharmony at the time.
