THE FAMILY FRIEND WE ALL LOVED TO SEE
The family friend who came into my life when I was young was viewed as a political giant in our house, writes Emily Hourican
IWAS brought up to admire John Hume. In our house, he was always considered a hero. He was first a part of my early childhood in Belfast, where my father, Liam, was RTÉ’s Northern correspondent, and met John and Pat.
They became friends and my mother remembers many dinners at the Hume house. There was, she says, always a pot of delicious stew on and anyone who turned up was fed without fuss.
Many turned up — apparently you never knew, in that house, who might appear: a world leader, or someone on the local housing list with nowhere yet to live. John brought them all home, Pat welcomed them.
My father spoke about John in the same way — often the same breath — as he spoke about Parnell, O’Connell, Martin Luther King: a man with a job to do; a sacred mission delivered in intensely pragmatic ways.
That mission was practical as well as ideological — an end to violence and bitterness; a roof over your head, an education, opportunity.
He understood politics in the way it is meant to be understood — as the framework within which we all live, the thing that gives us or denies us what we need. All politics, for John, was human.
My real memories of John are later, from holidays in France and visits he made to us in Brussels.
They aren’t necessarily fun memories — he was a serious man, who engaged in serious discussions (I remember his gift to my youngest sister, Martha, who is his god-daughter, when she was, I think, eight – it was a copy of a new biography just published about him. He delivered it and looked a bit surprised to find she wasn’t older.)
But, he was, she says, an excellent godfather; she remembers him turning up on her 18th birthday and buying drinks for all her friends, who were far more excited by his presence than by the drinks.
I remember him arriving in Kerry for my father’s funeral in 1993, at which stage he was deep into the talks with Gerry Adams that would see him reviled by so many, and the look of devastation on his face that told me how much the friendship with my dad meant to him too.
A couple of years later, at the memorial service, again in Kerry, John hadn’t been sure he would make it — he was then deep into the talks that paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement.
Somehow he managed it, and the first we knew that he would arrive were 17 missed calls to my sister’s mobile — evidence of the tenacity he brought to bear once he made his mind up.
John was a source of wisdom about many things in our house, not just politics. When we wanted a dog, it was his thoughts we heard on the subject.
And it wasn’t just us. Apparently Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton were both so impressed with his calm good sense that they took to consulting him on domestic topics as well as political.
Eventually I was old enough to ask what John had done to merit all this respect. I don’t know what I expected — that he’d taken a bullet, faced down a mob, charged a terrorist.
In a sense, he had done all of these, and more. However, what I was told confused me: “That man has been saying the same thing for 30 years.”
That didn’t strike me as much at the time. Now, I think, what a lonely place it must have been. How hard to battle the discouragement of not being listened to, of watching violence succeed violence in a downward spiral of hate and horror, and know that you have the answer, but few will listen.
And yet he did it, and survived times when he was ignored or even dismissed, and said what he had to say in old and new ways, until the world was ready to catch up with where he was.
John Hume’s vision triumphed because he was right, and because he was brilliant. My dad applied the Isaiah Berlin essay of the Fox and the Hedgehog to John.
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one big thing. John was the hedgehog. He knew one big thing and all his resources were concentrated on it.
Because of him, we live in a different world — one that, because of his actions, is better as he leaves it than it was when he found it.
The night before John’s funeral, my nine-year-old daughter dreamed that someone had stolen his ‘trophies’, as she called them — his peace prizes. She was very distressed in her dream, and wanted the trophies returned.
I reassured her: his trophies are safe. And they are. No one can take away from him the recognition he won.
But, more than that, no one can take away from us what he achieved, and what has happened in our world because of him.
‘We live in a different, better world because of John’s actions’