A formidable peacemaker
From humble beginnings, John Hume educated himself and used his astute political nous to fight for his devastated community
JOHN Hume is always associated with the P-word. But as well as being a lifelong pacifist, there was more than a touch of the pragmatist about him. When explaining why he had never taken the path of extreme nationalism, he recalled something his father Sam had told him: ‘You can’t eat a flag.’
Following his death at the age of 83, Hume will be rightly celebrated and remembered as the North’s greatest peacemaker.
It is entirely possible – and, indeed, quite likely – that the Troubles would still be raging if it hadn’t been for his tireless efforts to bring the violence to an end.
Yet, along with the highs of the Good Friday Agreement being signed in 1998, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with joint recipient David Trimble, there were many, many lows. It must have seemed at times as if there would be no end to the setbacks, false starts and, of course, the wanton bloodshed.
But Hume persevered and, in his unassuming, low-key way, played a pivotal role in delivering the greatest prize of all. Though sometimes underestimated because of his dishevelled appearance, he had a sharp intellect and formidable diplomatic skills. Yet, in some respects, he was the unlikeliest of politicians.
John Hume – the eldest of seven children – was born on January 18, 1937, in his grandparents’ small terraced house in Lower Nassau Street on the northern outskirts of Derry city. His own parents occupied one room in the house.
Hume’s father, who had Scots Presbyterian heritage, had been a soldier and later found sporadic work in the shipyards. His mother Annie Doherty, 14 years younger than her husband, came from a Co. Donegal family.
By the time young John was four, the family had moved elsewhere in the city to a rented home of their own. He was an altar boy during his primary-school days and also did a newspaper round to help with the family finances.
Due to a lucky accident of birth Hume was among the first generation to benefit from the 1944 Education Act, which opened up secondary schools to children from working-class backgrounds. He went on to the prestigious St Columb’s College, where he excelled at French and was also a noted footballer.
After finishing his secondary education, Hume won a scholarship to St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Co. Kildare, and began studying to be a cleric. Years later he remarked: ‘In those days, it was almost expected that the eldest son would go into the priesthood.’ But he changed his mind about a religious life after three years and, once he had completed his degree in French and history, returned to Derry and started teaching. By 1960 he had married his wife Pat, a fellow teacher, and the couple went on to have five children together.
Hume’s father had often written letters to council officials on behalf of neighbours unable to compose their own. Before long, his son was throwing himself into similar activities. It began with him organising pub quizzes in the Bogside and other poor areas where rates of joblessness were running at up to 30%.
The idea, according to a former school friend, was to ‘lift the unemployed out of their apathy’.
Hume also got involved with the cross-border Irish League of Credit Unions and, at the age of 27, became its youngest ever president. He was once quoted as saying: ‘All the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of, because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.’
By 1965, he was the chairman of a committee to have the North’s second university built in his hometown. He was also instrumental in setting up the Derry Housing Association, which was involved in building homes for the many that needed them.
But local government figures started putting up opposition to the housing projects, because they feared they would upset the city’s electoral demographics. Constituency boundaries had been drawn to give Protestant candidates an unfair advantage over their Catholic rivals.
As the end of the Sixties approached, John Hume was a prominent figure in the fledgling Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. He and others led a vociferous campaign in which they called for equal voting and housing rights for members of the Catholic community. They also demanded the disbanding of the widely despised reserve police force, the B-Specials.
At the height of the civil rights campaign, Hume was elected as an independent member of the North’s parliament in 1969.
The following summer, he was one of the five founder members of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
Hume wasn’t present at the Bloody Sunday march on January 30, 1972 – during which members of the Parachute Regiment killed 13 protesters (a 14th died from his injuries four months later) – because he was concerned over soldiers’ behaviour at a civil-rights meeting at Magilligan Strand, Co.
Derry, a week previously. He spent the evening trying to liaise with the victims’ families, which he described as a ‘shattering’ experience. Hume also said: ‘That day was dreadful, the worst day in the history of this city in my lifetime.’
After the Stormont administration was dissolved that same year, Hume served briefly as a minister in the power-sharing executive that replaced it. But when that collapsed in 1974, the family was left to survive on his wife’s income from teaching.
There was a change in his fortunes when Dick Burke, then Ireland’s European commissioner, recruited him as an adviser in 1978. Not only did that help salvage Hume’s political career, it also allowed him to draw attention to the North’s situation across Europe.
It was 1979 when his first major breakthrough came. That was the year he was elected to the European Parliament and also succeeded Gerry Fitt as the leader of the SDLP. By now familiar with the way things worked in Brussels, he used his knowledge to secure sizeable grants for Derry and other locations in the North.
He also concentrated on fostering contacts with influential American politicians such as Ted Kennedy and, in the years that followed, Hume became a regular visitor to the Oval Office and the US Congress.
Things were about to get busier,
He led a vociferous campaign for equal voting and housing rights for Catholics in the Sixties
Cruise O’Brien said he supped with the devil, Dunphy was scathing
though. The British general election of June 1983 saw Hume elected as MP for the newly created constituency of Foyle.
According to a profile published 20 years ago, his ‘life became one long shuttle between Belfast, London, Brussels, Strasbourg, Washington and Boston, sustained, it sometimes seemed, by cigarettes, Crunchie bars and alcohol’. During his first year at Westminster, he made a speech that was credited with convincing the Tory government not to reintroduce the death penalty in the North for terrorist offences.
Two years later Hume sat down with senior members of the IRA to discuss a possible end to their campaign. He was directed to a location in Co. Donegal, where he was blindfolded, bundled into a van and driven to Co. Mayo.
But the meeting was promptly terminated when Hume refused to allow the IRA men to videotape the conversation.
In 1988, however, Fr Alec Reid, the Co. Tipperary-born priest who was a key go-between in the peace process, asked him to meet in private with Gerry Adams.
It was these initial talks that paved the way for the first IRA ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement and the eventual decommissioning of weapons. But there were, of course, tortuous negotiations involving all sides along the way. When news of the talks emerged in 1993, Hume was criticised for being naive or – completely unfairly – even an accomplice of Adams. Former cabinet minister Conor Cruise O’Brien said: ‘In supping with the devil, he is using too short a spoon.’ He was subjected to particularly scathing attacks by Eamon Dunphy.
Hume’s wife Pat later recalled that it was an ‘especially difficult’ period because ‘all hell broke loose’. She said: ‘He was vilified from one end of Ireland to the other end. He just wasn’t able to sleep. He wasn’t eating properly. There were all sorts of vicious letters arriving in the post, vicious phone calls coming.’ But the critics were conveniently ignoring the fact that Hume had already suffered on the double. Though he had few fans among the unionist community, his resolutely anti-violence stance also won him many enemies on the republican side of the divide.
There had been death threats from various quarters. Two of his cars were destroyed by IRA sympathisers. In a more sinister development, five hooded men tried to firebomb his home in 1987. Ultimately though, Hume was completely vindicated. The guns fell silent and the North began to experience some semblance of normality for the first time in almost 30 years.
When the Nobel committee honoured his work in 1998, Hume donated his prize money – around £300,000 – to charity. It was also in the late Nineties that he started suffering from poor health.
HE was attending a conference in Austria when he fell ill with a ruptured intestine, which led to a severe bout of blood poisoning. His wife said in late 2015: ‘He was on a ventilator and all sorts of machinery. The body was under severe stress. He had no reserves of strength left and the hospital authorities thought he would not make it.
‘Something went wrong with the ventilator and I think it was at that stage that he suffered some brain damage. This, down through the years, has got worse and his memory is now very bad.’
Though he had stepped down as SDLP leader in 2001, John Hume announced his complete retirement from the political frontline in 2004. After years of traversing the globe on his peace mission, most of his final years were spent at the modest end-of-terrace house in Derry he shared with Pat.
There was also trips to their holiday home across the border in Greencastle, Co. Donegal, and visits to see his beloved Derry City FC at the Brandywell. Until relatively recent years, he remained an active member of his local branch of the SDLP.
Along with the 40-odd honorary doctorates that were bestowed upon him by various universities around the world, he received another accolade in 2010.
That was the year he was named Ireland’s Greatest in a public poll run by RTÉ to choose the most significant figure in our history.
It was a tribute that was echoed in recent years by one of his oldest political allies.
‘There is a greatness about his political life,’ observed late SDLP co-founder Seamus Mallon, who was the party’s deputy leader for Hume’s entire time in charge.
‘I would put him in the same breath as Parnell and Daniel O’Connell,’ he said.