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Claire Hanna said her party would seek to re-enter the executive `when the conditions are right´ after five years in opposition at Stormont.

The SDLP has “turned a corner” and has signs of life and momentum heading into the next assembly election, party leader Claire Hanna has said.

Speaking ahead of the party’s conference on Saturday, Ms Hanna said she feels her Stormont group has had a “substantial impact” in opposition, but would seek to re-enter the executive “when the conditions are right”.

Elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly and local councils are due to take place around May 2027.

Ms Hanna has yet to lead the SDLP into an Assembly election, having taken over as party leader in October 2024 following the resignation of Foyle MP Colum Eastwood.

The number of SDLP MLAs has fallen consistently since power-sharing was established, going from 24 in 1998 to eight in 2022.

“I was pretty frank with the party and with the public about where we were two years ago and about the challenges for our party, and I do think we have turned a corner,” Ms Hanna said.

“We are up in the polls, and we’ve other signs of life and momentum, but we’ve done that, not by pretending to be anybody else, we’ve done that by remembering who we are and our values as an anti-sectarian, centre-left New Ireland party.”

One of the SDLP’s highest-profile councillors, Paul Doherty, resigned the whip in April after his colleagues abstained on a DUP motion relating to a statue of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

It emerged that the memorial had been erected without planning permission, although Belfast City Council had not previously taken any action.

At the time, Ms Hanna characterised some of the criticism of the party as a “pile-on” aiming to “delegitimise anti-sectarian constitutional nationalism”.

The SDLP leader said they were “sorry to lose” Mr Doherty, describing the situation as “really upsetting” for the party.

“It was a challenging time, and I wish it hadn’t happened, but we are consistent,” she said.

“I want to make the same approach, I don’t think that I and the SDLP would have integrity if we said it’s one set of planning rules for memorialisation with one identity, and it’s a different set for for an identity that is further away.

“I don’t think that has integrity, and I don’t think that it gets us to that wider place of understanding that we try to.

“But look, politics is hard, this place is complicated.

“The SDLP’s never been a party that’s gone in for the quick fire yay or nay answer, we accept the reality and sometimes that’s difficult.”

Asked if she saw any value in a pact between nationalist parties to maximise a pro-united Ireland vote, Ms Hanna said the “beauty” of proportional representation is allowing voters to “put it about electorally”.

“The SDLP will be going forward, making the case of the SDLP as your best choice for a new Ireland with a better Northern Ireland along the way,” she said.

“We will be reflecting a lot of what we’ve learned and done as the opposition party, and that is challenging the political failure of the larger parties, who’ve been in the executive, who have failed, we believe, to use the mandate and use the power that they got from the people to either improve life in the here and now or to really help us build the case towards a new Ireland.

“I’ll be going and presenting this party to the electorate and making the best case that I can.”

In their time in opposition at Stormont, Ms Hanna said the SDLP had endeavoured to “use the mandate people gave us in the best possible way”.

“I think we’ve had a pretty substantial impact with that mandate, the mandate wasn’t huge that we got the last time, and that’s what we want to communicate to people, we didn’t get a tonne of votes the last time, we accept,” she said.

“We’ve, in all humility, tried to reengage with the electorate through things like town halls, through things like deeper thinking, but we’ve shown what we can do with that relatively small mandate and we will be asking people for the strength to do more and to bring that change to the assembly.”

If the party’s vote share is to increase in May 2027, Ms Hanna said they would “love to be” in the Executive again “when the conditions are right”.

“We will be doing a programme for government negotiation based on the policies,” she said.

“We’ve produced a suite of policies over the last year and and more to come, and if we feel that our mandate can be well used in the executive and we feel that some of those procedures are changed, if we’re still getting resistance from both of the big parties from the likes of the St Andrews veto which effectively allows them to to block out and drown out smaller parties, if we get reform of that then we will certainly make that judgment.