Winning over US put Hume on road to greatness
APPROPRIATELY enough, it all began with a credit union loan. It was 1972 and the North was enduring a terrible year of murder and mayhem, including the killing of 14 innocent people by British soldiers in Derry.
John Hume, a charismatic civil rights leader from Derry, had big ideas about finding a way out of the mess this country was in. But he had no money.
He and his wife, Pat, had five children, all entirely dependent on her teacher’s salary. Suddenly, he got an invitation to meet one of the most influential Irish-Americans, Senator Ted Kennedy, at the Irish Embassy in Bonn.
The credit union loan, appropriately to a man who had championed the foundation of those people’s banks all over Ireland, covered the flight and a hotel room.
Happily, the meeting was a huge success. Kennedy believed Hume had the formula which could unlock the conflict, and he was prepared to use his influence in Washington to put the case to Britain.
Thus we are at the start of the documentary film ‘John Hume in America’ which screens tomorrow night on RTÉ television. The documentary, which I have had the privilege of seeing, draws in a huge range of characters who were at the heart of it all over almost 40 years.
There are contributions from two US presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; two British prime ministers, John Major and Tony Blair; the American mediator George Mitchell, and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. There are also a host of former Irish diplomats whose unsung skills proved vital in the whole 30-year-long series of interlinked projects.
Hume’s message was deceptively simple: Nothing would be achieved by violence. The people of Ireland were divided – it was not about two pieces of turf. Resolution must begin in the North and the key to any change was the principle of consent.
In America, this message faced two potent enemies. One enemy was Irish-Americans’ unthinking IRA support, via the “money jar on the bar”. The other, more powerful enemy, was reticence by Washington’s political elite, who accepted Northern Ireland’s problems were an internal UK matter and they did not risk irking London by interfering.
Hume set out to change the Washington elite’s view of Northern Ireland as a more urgent but achievable goal.
Changing grass-roots IrishAmerica would have to wait.
Relatively quickly he succeeded by persuading not just Kennedy, but a host of others including the legendary Tipp O’Neill – as speaker of the House of Representatives, the second most powerful politician in the USA.
To paraphrase his long-time colleague Séamus Mallon, Hume went to where power was and he sought to use all his persuasive powers to influence those with that power. Over a tireless political career, he successfully sold this self-proclaimed “single transferable speech” in Dublin, Washington, London and Brussels.
Eventually he even sold it, albeit very belatedly, to Sinn Féin and the IRA. There is an interesting contribution from Gerry Adams who admits they “wasted years”. He does not add that they also wasted thousands of lives.
Hume himself was too ill to take part in the making of this film. But it is replete with footage of his memorable comments and assessments. Very striking is his defence of the hugely controversial “Hume-Adams dialogue” in the early 1990s, insisting he was doing it to help save lives, it was no disrespect to IRA victims.
There are many other evocative moments, not least Hume’s lament for the dead hunger striker Bobby Sands, whom he saw as a pawn of both British and IRA propaganda. It was praise indeed to hear the Democratic Unionist Party MP Geoffrey Donaldson admit Hume was light years ahead of Unionists in opening up these US contacts.
It was also interesting to note Margaret Thatcher’s close ally, Lord McAlpine, had said the hardline British prime minister lamented agreeing the 1985 AngloIrish Agreement. But she said the Americans had “made her do it”.
This film is not all upbeat achievements, though there are uplifting moments. The grim reality of all the reverses, the senseless killing and destruction, are well chronicled via lots of old footage.
Hume worked closely with Dublin, especially the Irish diplomats. But he always argued Dublin governments had never defined what they wanted from Irish unity. This left Unionists to characterise it as “conquest of the north by the south”, making unity a dirty word.
“Ireland must be one of the few places on earth where people seriously suggest it is wrong to unite people,” Hume reflected.
There is a magical score by Limerick music genius Bill Whelan to round it all off. The impeccable narration is by the actor Liam Neeson. Anyone with even a passing interest in Irish history must see it.
The film does not canonise Hume. Mallon says he could be a difficult person, bad at accepting criticism and prone to solo runs which disenchanted colleagues.
But Mallon’s verdict is unequivocal: “There is a greatness about his political life, what he did, and what he helped to change. I would put him in the same breath as Parnell and Daniel O’Connell.”
One enemy was Irish-Americans’ unthinking support for the IRA, via the ‘money jar on the bar’. Another was US fear of irking London
π ‘John Hume in America’ airs on RTÉ One at 9.35pm tomorrow.