The SDLP has been “a bit stuck” and focused too much on past glories, Claire Hanna has said.
The freshly-ratified SDLP leader told her party conference in Belfast that in recent decades “we haven’t always been quick enough on our feet”.
But setting out her plans for the coming months, the MP for South Belfast and Mid Down said the party was “going to be clear about who we are and where we’re going”.
“We’re going to find the people in communities who are making change and ask them to make it with us,” she said.
“We’re going to grow our team - we need people who share our values and our purpose to join us and pitch in.”
Galway-born Ms Hanna used her speech to outline her left-leaning political heritage. She spoke of how her father Eamon, a former SDLP general secretary, had been involved in the civil rights movement and how her mother Carmel had served in an early incarnation of the Stormont executive.
“The story of my parents is the story of nearly every founding member of our party,” she said.
“Normal people working to provide for their families, but who saw injustice, poverty, division, and put themselves in the service of their neighbours.”
She also spoke about her husband, Dubliner Donal Lyons, a Belfast SDLP councillor. She described him as a “man of conviction – confident in his values, certain in what he believes is right”.
“The people in my life, so many in this party, who’ve put themselves in the service of others, have shaped the person and politician I try to be,” she said.
She said the SDLP had not been clear “about who we are” and that situation had enabled “others to define the narratives about us”.
“At times we’ve listened to each other more than we’ve listened to voters – we’ve tried to make people think, when people need to feel,” she said.
“We’ve given the impression of looking back, instead of looking forward. It can be hard to look forward when politics is so often dragged to the past.”
She said nostalgia was “great... but it’s no political strategy”.
Ms Hanna said it wasn’t the party’s job to “teach people how great John Hume and Seamus Mallon were”.
“Our job is to make people feel the way they made people feel,” she said.
“Like that founding generation, our job is to see the poverty, the division, the wasted opportunity, and to put ourselves to work, to the service of our neighbours.”
She said her leadership would “focus on the things we can control, the things we need to change”.
“I want people to feel represented when they vote for us, empowered – to feel ambitious for their community, hopeful for the future,” she said.
“Our vision, and the clue’s in the name, is a social democracy.”
The SDLP leader said social democracy meant “social cohesion, not all the culture war”.
“It means reconciling competing interests, not just carving up the spoils,” she said.
“It means social solidarity, pluralism; not ethnonationalism, not majoritarianism.”
She reiterated her party’s commitment to seeking reform of the Stormont institutions and to “exploring the real, fresh interest in a new Ireland”.
“That a New Ireland does mean change, but that it doesn’t mean a rupture of everything you know. It’s taking pride in what we share as northerners, while believing we can build something bigger together. Rejecting the politics of zero sum, but knowing that having ideals for the future isn’t sectarian.”
She said constitutional change wasn’t for its own sake but that the purpose was to “create a fairer, more prosperous society, with reconciliation at its heart”.