John Hume (18 January 19373 August 2020) was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Hume served in the Parliament of Northern Ireland; the Northern Ireland Assembly including, in 1974, its first power-sharing executive; the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament. Seeking an accommodation between Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism, and soliciting American support, he was both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the republican embrace of "armed struggle". In their 1998 citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised Hume as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. For his own part, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.
Early life and education
Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie" (née Doherty), a seamstress, and Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker. He had a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal.
Hume was among the first to benefit from the 1947 Education Act. which in Northern Ireland "revolutionised access to secondary and further education". It provided him with scholarships, first to attend St Columb's College, a fee-paying grammar school, and then St Patrick's College, Maynooth. This was the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. Among his teachers was Tomás Ó Fiaich.
Ó Fiaich's colleague, Monsignor Brendan Devlin recalls that the future cardinal and Primate of All Ireland turned his student (with whom he spoke in Irish) towards the local history of Ulster. Devlin believes that, being a Derry man Hume "didn't need much pushing".You begin to ask questions ... how did this come around. I grew up in a city surrounded by battlements. Everything inside the battlement was Protestant and everything in the slums was Catholic. Is this normal in the city? Is this a normal city? And if you have any brains at all you begin to find out it is not. You know, it's not normal and the government of the city is gerrymandered. My crowd is getting no show at all. There must be a reason for this. And, of course, John got into all that.Hume did not complete his clerical studies but graduated in 1958 with a degree in French and history. In 1958, he returned home to his native Derry, where he became a teacher at his Alma mater, St Columb's College, later, in 1964, earning an MA from Maynooth with a thesis exploring the conditions that drove Derry's principal export in the 19th century, emigrants.Hume, John (2002) Derry Beyond the Walls: Social and Economic Aspects of the Growth of Derry, Ulster Historical foundation, Belfast.
First civic and political engagement
Credit-union movement In 1960, aged 23, Hume helped establish the Derry Credit Union, the first cooperative community bank in Northern Ireland. Pooling their resources, working people were able to create a low-interest alternative to moneylenders and pawn shops. Such was the success of this exercise in what he represented as "practical Christianity" (and as "Catholic in origin"), that within four years Hume had become the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions, a role in which he served until 1968. He was later to remark that of all the things he contributed to in his life, he was proudest of his engagement with credit unions, no movement having done "more good for the people of Ireland, north and south".
The "Third Force" In 1963, drawing on his Maynooth thesis research, Hume wrote a script for a television documentary on Derry, A City Solitary, that was broadcast on both the BBC and RTÉ. It persuaded The Irish Times to open its pages to the "first considered statement" of Hume's political views
Under the title "The Northern Catholic" (18 and 19 May 1964), Hume wrote of an emerging "third force": a "generation of younger Catholics in the North" frustrated with the nationalist policy of non-recognition and abstention. Determined to engage the great social problems of housing, unemployment and emigration, they were willing to accept "the Protestant tradition in the North as legitimate" and that Irish unity should be achieved only "by the will of the Northern majority."
"Normal politics" would not emerge in Northern Ireland from Catholic engagement alone. Much would depend on the responsiveness of the northern government whose "skilful placing" of investment was contributing to exceptionally high Catholic unemployment and emigration. If the governing unionists failed to respond to "repeated statements of Catholic willingness to get together", he warned that there would be a hardening of opinion and further polarisation.
Hume first test of the possibilities for change was as chair in 1965 of the University for Derry Committee. Accompanied by the city's Unionist mayor, Albert Anderson, and its Stormont MP, the leader of the Nationalist party, Eddie McAteer, Hume led a 25,000-strong protest on the steps of Stormont, convinced that the case for developing Derry's Magee College as Northern Ireland's second university was "unanswerable". When the city lost out to Coleraine, and when later the same year Derry again lost to Lurgan and Portadown for a new urban-industrial development, Hume sensed a wider conspiracy. Addressing a meeting in London of the Labour Party ginger group, Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, he suggested that "the plan" was "to cause a migration from West to East Ulster, redistributing and scattering the minority to that the Unionist Party will not only maintain but strengthen its position".Derry Journal, 6 August 1965, cited in Kingsley, Paul (1989), Londonderry Revisited: A Loyalist Analysis of the Civil Rights Controversy. Belfast Publications, pp. 98-99,
Involved in voluntary housing movement in his home city, Hume argued that (notwithstanding "excellent assistance" form the Ministry of Development), he battled the same sectarian-political logic within Derry itself. A unionist minority secured majority control of the city council through gerrymandering which involved restricting planning permission for potential Catholic homes.
Duke Street march, October 1968 On 5 October 1968, the Derry Labour Party and Derry Housing Action Committee proceeded with a march in the city, originally sponsored by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), in defiance of a last-minute order by the government alarmed at the prospect of a clash with parading Apprentice Boys. Hume, had had no part in the organisation. He had refused an invitation to set up a NICRA branch in his home city. He was wary of the association's infiltration by left-wing activists such as Derry socialist Eamon McCann. McCann later conceded that "conscious, if unspoken strategy", of the march organisers, "was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities".Hume appeared on the day but, in the recollection of McCann, walked on the pavement alongside the march, "half there and half not".
A later official inquiry found that all that had been required for police to begin "using their batons indiscriminately" against the 400 protesters (among them Belfast Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt, hit twice on the head and hospitalised) was defiance of the initial order to disperse. The Duke Street march sparked two days of street fighting as protesters and residents resisted the entry of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into the Catholic Bogside. Hume, elected vice-chair of a new Citizens’ Action Committee (CAC), called for a sit-down protest at the Guildhall two weeks later. A further peaceful demonstration organised and stewarded by CAC on 16 November attracted 15,000. With the government appearing to respond, both Hume's committee and NICRA called for a suspension of further protests.
Stormont MP Enters electoral politics In response to the events in Derry, the Unionist government announced that the city's corporation would be replaced by an independent development commission. It also committed to a needs-based points system for public housing, an ombudsman to investigate citizen grievances, the abolition of the rates-based franchise in council elections, and a review of the broad security provisions of the Special Powers Act. When these reforms were placed in jeopardy by the internal unionist dissension, and a snap election was called by Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Hume decided to enter electoral politics.
In the February 1969 poll, he secured 55 percent of the vote in his home Foyle constituency against 33 percent for the standing MP and long-time leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, and 12 percent for McCann of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. Notwithstanding their contest, six months later, on 12 August 1969, Hume linked arms with McAteer in an attempt to hold back his constituents in a further confrontation with the police, recalled as the Battle of the Bogside.
In the election Hume had presented himself as an independent, but his immediate objective was the formation of a broad-based party that could advance the wider reform he believed necessary.
Joins in the formation of the SDLP In August 1970, Hume became deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) which he formed with five other Stormont MPs: Gerry Fitt, Republican Labour Party; Austin Currie, Nationalist Party; Paddy Devlin, Northern Ireland Labour Party; and independents, NICRA activists Ivan Cooper and Paddy O’Hanlon. Serving as the party's General Secretary (until his assassination by loyalists in June 1973)Chronology of the Conflict: June 1973, CAIN was Republican-Labour Senator, Paddy Wilson.
According to Devlin, this coalition had not been Hume's first choice. In June 1970, Hume had broken with others in the group in supporting Eddie McAteer, as the Westminster challenger to the Unionist for Londonderry. The others were of the view that the civil-rights campaigner Claude Wilton was the more credible candidate. They believed a Protestant, who, as an Ulster Liberal, had taken more than a third of the vote in the constituency the year before,Claude Wilton obituary, Liberal Democrat News, 3 October 2008. had "just the sort of cross-community support" they were aiming to attract "as the bedrock" of their new party. Hume had been meeting with McAteer's Nationalists and with Gerry Quigley's National Democratic Party, and was pulled back to the Stormont group only when they announced that they were going ahead with a new party under the leadership of Fitt. Hume proposed that it be called the "Social Democratic Party", but Fitt and Devlin had insisted that without "Labour" in its title, the party would not be acceptable to their working-class voters in Belfast.
Not embraced in the new party was Bernadette Devlin. Devlin had made international headlines, aged 21, as the youngest MP to enter the British House of Commons following her victory in April 1969 as the "Unity" candidate in a Mid Ulster by-election, and again in December when given a six months' sentence for her role in the defence of the Bogside. Viewing her as having gone "wholly over to the International Socialists in Britain", Hume described her as a "disaster".