The King of Ireland
Clinton likens John to civil rights hero Martin Luther EX-PRESIDENT HAILS HUMES ROLE IN NORTH’S PEACE PROCESS
JOHN Hume has been hailed by a former US President as Ireland’s Martin Luther King for his role in bringing peace to the North.
Bill Clinton tells how the soft-spoken ex-teacher from Derry was instrumental in ending decades of bloodshed.
A documentary to air on RTE next week shows how the former SDLP leader harnessed political support on Capitol Hill to help forge peace.
Clinton said: “He didn’t seem to have an agenda other than the one he was pursuing. He wanted an inclusive peace and he thought non-violence was the best way to pursue it.
“He was the Irish conflict’s Martin Luther King.
“Where many other people would have quit, he intensified his efforts. I trusted his instincts.
“He just believed he was on the right side of history and had read the Irish psyche properly.” Clinton, 71, said he was strongly criticised by the British Government for getting involved but Hume’s assurance peace could be brokered “made it a hell of a lot easier”. He said: “I cultivated the leaders of all the parties in Northern Ireland. We invited them all to St Patrick’s Day and we urged them to sing together and talk together. “A lot of diplomacy happened in the US on these St Patrick’s Days.” The former president said addressing the people of Derry on his 1995 visit was a turning point.
He revealed: “People knew it was the beginning of something special. Because by then the ceasefire had come and we were ready to roll.
“I felt we were riding along a surge of history that had really begun with the vision of one man.”
The 90-minute documentary, narrated by Liam Neeson, tells how Hume harnessed the support of key American politicians to pressure all sides of the conflict to the negotiating table. Hume’s wife Pat said when her husband first took a call from Ted Kennedy in 1972 he couldn’t believe it.
The American senator was attending a NATO meeting in Bonn, Germany and wanted to meet up.
Pat said: “The whole of the North was a cauldron. Derry was in the height of The Troubles. I was teaching and we’d five small children.
“So he went to the Credit Union and he got a loan for a flight to Bonn and one night’s accommodation.”
Former US Ambassador Sean Donlon said Hume had embraced the ideology which would form the basis for the Good Friday Agreement as far back as 1964.
He said: “It is forgotten now but it will become clear as history is written. His major achievement was the creation of the new agenda back in 1964.
“The way he was able to steer that through Dublin, London, Brussels, Washington and eventually persuade Sinn Fein [over the ceasefire] – it is a remarkable
I felt we were riding along the surge of history that began with the vision of one man
BILL CLINTON ON THE IMPORTANCE OF EX-SDLP LEADER HUME
John’s ability to speak the language of the American politician was a plus
BONO TELLS HOW HUME’S GIFT OF LANGUAGE WAS USEFUL
achievement in one lifetime.” U2 frontman Bono – who sent Hume a hand-drawn card for his 80th birthday last year – is also fulsome in his praise.
He tells the cameras: “Language works in all kinds of directions in John’s story. The ability to speak the language of the American politician was a plus.
“I think it’s worth remembering how John Hume took down the emotional temperature of The Troubles just enough so that reason could be heard.”
The documentary uses archive footage to show how Hume adopted the non-violent tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement.
In one tense clip he is seen arguing with a British army officer as he led an anti-internment march on Derry’s Magilligan Strand in 1972.
The army blocked the march and fired rubber bullets into a crowd that included women and children. Hume asked: “Are you proud of how your men have treated this crowd today?” The incident led him to oppose a march on the streets of Derry the following Sunday. But it went ahead and his worst fears were realised as 14 people were shot dead. The events of Bloody Sunday were a defining moment for The Troubles and focused international attention on Northern Ireland. In 1985 Hume, who was then leader of the SDLP, met Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams in Donegal where he was blindfolded, bundled into a van and taken to Mayo to meet the IRA.
The paramilitaries wanted the interview videotaped but Hume refused and the meeting ended before it had begun. But it marked the start of a clandestine dialogue between Hume and Adams.
Reflecting on their negotiations Adams reveals: “We wasted years… I suppose through naivety. What stood to us and probably the peace process was we met privately for about 18 months, so we developed a sense of each other.”
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Hume’s strength was in not describing the IRA and Sinn Fein as terrorists and promoting a process of engagement.
In 1985 Hume’s decades of working with the White House started to pay dividends, as Ronald Reagan put pressure on Margaret Thatcher to sign the Angloirish Agreement.
Thatcher later told a friend she hated giving the Republic any sort of voice in the North and insisted: “The Americans made me do it.”
Special US envoy George Mitchell, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, said the deal was possible because of the “political genius of John Hume”.
At the end of the show a caption informs viewers its subject was too ill to take part. Hume’s wife Pat revealed last year he now suffers from dementia.
John Hume In America is on RTE One on Tuesday at 9.35pm.