57

John Hume

1937–2020

 

In 1998 John Hume, along with the Ulster Unionist Leader DAVID TRIMBLE [40], was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.  Since 1969, during the long purgatory of the Northern Ireland troubles, John Hume, as leader of the largely Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), has carried the burden of the majority of the nationalist community.  He has tried to reach a permanent and just settlement in the face of Unionist determination to retain the tie to Britain on the one hand, and the terrorism of the IRA and the demands of Sinn Féin for a united Ireland on the other.  He has sought to achieve reform, reconciliation, and, eventually - very eventually - reunification.  Hume has proved very important to the breaking of the mould into which history has cast the politics of Ireland as a whole.

      John Hume is a Derryman, a native of a city that plays a large part in the imagined history of Northern Ireland.  To Catholics, Derry means Daire, the monastery founded by the great ST COLUMCILLE [58].  To unionists it is Londonderry, the brave city that closed its gates against the army of James II and resisted a long siege in the cause of William III.  Though its people share a common soil, they live in different countries.  Derry's politics has always been volatile, though it lacks the wealth of Belfast and was cut off by partition from its natural hinterland in Donegal.

      John Hume was born on 18th January 1937, the son of Samuel Hume, of Derry.  He was educated at St Columb's College in Derry, and at St Patrick's College in Maynooth, taking a master's degree from the National University of Ireland.  He married Patricia Hume in 1960.  They live in Derry, where they have reared a family of two sons and three daughters.

      John Hume was of the first generation of Ulster people to benefit from free secondary and university education provided by the Education Act of 1944.  He worked first as a teacher in Derry, but emerged into public life initially as a community leader, involved especially in the credit union movement, which was so important in working-class areas of Ireland, and served as president of the Credit Union League of Ireland from 1964 to 1968.

      With these strong roots in the community, he was inevitably drawn into a full-time political career, being elected MP to the Northern Ireland parliament for Foyle in 1969.  This was the year that the present troubles began, though for nationalists there had been troubles as far back as the 1880s.  When Stormont was dissolved by direct rule from London, Hume was elected to the British Parliament for Londonderry, now Foyle.  He was minister of commerce in the short-lived power-sharing executive of 1974.  He has also been a member of the European Parliament since 1979.

      Hume was a founding member of the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), serving as its deputy leader from 1970 to 1979.  He was elected leader in 1979, and since then has played a central and increasingly influential role in the resolution of the Ulster problem.  The party was intended to provide Ulster politics with a new beginning.  The old nationalist party was hopelessly out of touch with the new situation, and the resurgence of Sinn Féin posed as much of a threat to Catholics as to unionists.  The SDLP was intended to provide a party which was social democratic, would cross community boundaries, and provide a common party for the working-class voters of all traditions.

      Inevitably, however, it developed as a largely Catholic party due to the nature of community politics in Northern Ireland.  But the party has never lost its initial aspiration, and remains involved in the world-wide social democratic movement.  John Hume himself served on the bureau of the socialist group in the European Parliament - the largest political grouping in that body.

      But the growth of a new sense of unity that has affected the lives of all Europeans could not eradicate overnight the long and tangled history of Hume's homeland.  This is where John Hume's real purpose in life was to be.  The settlement in Northern Ireland, reached on Good Friday 1998, was due largely to his patience in drawing Sinn Féin and the IRA into a more conventional form of politics.

      Ireland has now moved on.  The Good Friday Agreement, representing the first time since 1918 that the whole island voted together on one issue, has hopefully provided a new way ahead.  The claims to a mandate by the IRA and the other terrorist groups have been shown to be empty.  A new way of dealing with the relations between the communities in the north, and the governments, north and south, east and west, may be developing.

      If this is so, Ireland as a whole owes John Hume (who retired at the end of 2000 as party leader) an unrepayable debt.  He and his party have brought about a sea change, but as is ever the case the future is not always in the hands of good men.  Though the Northern Ireland Assembly has become functional, Northern Ireland remains among the troubled places of the world.