ON TIRING AND COLD DAYS JOHN HUME STOOD FIRM

IT’S the bitter cold that I remember more than anything. That spring was unseasonably wintry, and the grounds of Castle Buildings at Stormont were mucky and slick underfoot, churned by the pacing of dozens of journalists from Ireland and all over the world, waiting through the days and nights of talks for the elusive breakthrough.

Looking back now, it’s awesome to consider just how much hung on the outcome of those talks, in that place, between fallible humans who were tired and cold and hungry (rumours used to circulate in the Press room that there were plans to starve them into consensus) and, in Bertie Ahern’s case, newly bereaved, but all doggedly, fiercely determined not to let the hand of history slip from their shoulders.

And of the players, it is John Hume I remember more than anyone. Because if there was any cause for hope, in those long days when optimism ebbed and waned, and there were walkouts and tantrums and ruptures that seemed irreparable, it was embodied in John Hume, in his decency, eloquence and humanity, but also in his deep weariness: Not just reactive weariness from hours of circular, frustrating, knife-edge negotiations, but existential weariness from years and years of hatred and slaughter and suspicion and enmity between ordinary people who had so much more in common than they’d ever had a chance to discover.

He was tired, and tired of it, they all were, and harshness of a delayed spring – it snowed that Good Friday – seemed like a metaphor: to everything there is a season, but the coldest winter eventually gives way to brighter days. It was John Hume, above all, who had the audacity and vision to picture those days when nobody else could see through the icy gloom.