Without a doubt, he was the greatest Irishman since Parnell – we owe him our gratitude
IT was the decision in 1965 of the Stormont Parliament to situate a proposed new university at Coleraine, rather than Magee College in Derry, which first caused our paths to cross. We didn’t know it then, but the decision to reject Derry as the site of the new university was a watershed moment in the history of Northern Ireland.
Taken with the government’s resolution to abandon the railway to Fermanagh and Tyrone and the controversial siting of a new city between Lurgan and Portadown, it confirmed a feeling among nationalists, and some unionists, that a policy of deliberate neglect was being pursued for the area west of the River Bann.
As a young nationalist MP at Stormont, I was there when John Hume arrived in a motorcade to promote the cause of Magee College and protest against Coleraine; it was a big occasion.
Despite the fact that Eddie McAteer was the leader of the nationalist party and Foyle’s representative in Stormont, John Hume was the master of that campaign.
We met next in the early stages of the civil rights campaign, following the first march from Coalisland to Dungannon on August 24, 1968. John wasn’t involved at leadership level in the Derry march, planned for October, but he and Ivan Cooper became prominent immediately afterwards.
When a general election was called for February 24, 1969, John ran against Eddie McAteer and won. We became colleagues in Stormont, joined by Ivan Cooper and Paddy O’Hanlon. We were agreed – things had to change; a new political force was required.
By 1970, we were a group of six – now including Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt. We had agreed, in principle, to set up a new party, that it should be democratically organised, be left-of-centre and committed to the reunification of Ireland by peaceful means and by consent of the majority in the North as well as the south.
We needed a name. Fitt and Devlin wanted ‘Labour’ to come first in the title but Cooper, Hume, O’Hanlon and I wanted ‘Social Democratic’.
We argued that a new party needed a new name and that ‘Social Democrat’ would project a new image in the context of a new Europe. Having agreed on everything else, we acceded and agreed to the Labour and Social Democratic party. Minutes afterwards, Paddy Devlin, lying back on the couch with his eyes shut, sat up.
“F**k,” he said, “the f**king LSD f**king party.”
The connection with drugs and pre-decimalisation money won the argument that John and I, with all our European idealism, could not.
The six of us in the SDLP were the largest group in the opposition at Stormont. We were an effective and formidable team, proving our worth and punching above our weight, particularly on TV.
We each brought individual strengths but John had a tremendous capacity to quickly write a statement expressing the consensus view of our discussions. He had a formidable capacity to analyse a situation and present it as part of a consistent line of argument. He was the best draft-writer I’ve ever known.
In the 1973 election, the SDLP gained substantially, growing from a group of six to 19 and now including Seamus Mallon.
We went on to Sunningdale and the power-sharing executive where John was Head of the Department of Commerce. I took on the Department of Housing, Local Government and Planning.
In those early years, our two families spent a lot of time together in Donegal. Children arrived and normal life went on – Pat and my wife Annita were teachers and mothers, and kept the families together amid considerable pressures. Their patience must have been sorely tried.
When Ted Kennedy was visiting Europe with his wife, John received a request to meet him. He borrowed from the credit union and off he went. John went out of his way to make personal contact with people, and that vision looked beyond Northern Ireland to Europe and the US – connections which still stand the test of time.
We had our differences on policy matters over the years, but I always accepted John’s ability. I always accepted his commitment to non-violence.
When, in 1988, John told me that he’d been in discussion with Gerry Adams and asked me to join an SDLP team for further discussion, which would involve teams from both sides, I told him I would have to think about it. The clincher was that if we were successful in convincing Sinn Féin that our policies were right and a political alternative to violence could be built for the republican movement, it could lead to the ending of violence. Anything that would save lives had to be supported.
Without reservation, I say that John Hume is the greatest Irishman since Parnell. It requires great moral, physical and political courage to pursue the path he followed.
His consistency of purpose during three decades of violence and his vision for achieving peace laid the foundations for the 1994 IRA ceasefire and the later negotiations which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement. He never departed – not for one moment – from a complete insistence on the non-violent approach to our problems.
John Hume was a prime mover in the process which brought peace to Ireland and we owe him immense gratitude.