Elegant tribute to a true Irish hero
In The Name Of Peace: John Hume In America (PG) Heroic tribute
HALFWAY through Maurice Fitzpatrick’s elegant documentary about John Hume, I realised that while I felt it was presented a bit simplistically to appeal to an American audience, in fact it probably needed to be signposted for the home audience, too.
An entire generation has grown up unaware of the minutiae and nuances of the Troubles, and all the politicking it took to end the violence. This documentary is an extremely thorough and authoritative primer on one aspect of the solution — the pressure the US brought to bear on Westminster to reach a solution.
That never would have happened without John Hume, the SDLP leader who engaged Irish America of the time— especially Speaker Tip O’Neill, Senator Ted Kennedy, and New York Governor Hugh Carey and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan — to force London, and Margaret Thatcher in particular, to work towards a settlement.
Hume’s misfortune, if you could call it such, was that in bringing militant republicanism into the mainstream, his own party ultimately became irrelevant, though if the price was peace, he hardly cared.
Now suffering from dementia, Hume is absent from the film, except in archive clips. His wife Pat makes an admirable stand-in, and the colourful parade of witnesses — among them Jean Kennedy Smith, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, Enda Kenny, Gerry Adams, Jeffrey Donaldson and a host of often unsung career diplomats — flesh out the extraordinary story of a man whose initial quest for civil rights for Catholics grew into a much larger movement, and left him ‘the Irish conflict’s Martin Luther King’, as Clinton says.
With measured and mellifluous narration by Liam Neeson, and original music by Bill Whelan of Riverdance fame, this often feels like an obituary, but it is a well-made tribute to a true Irish hero, and a substantial addition to the canon of Troubles documentaries. OUT now in selected cinemas