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Irish nationalist politician (1937–2020)

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 Northern Ireland Parliament; 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" Belfast Agreement. For himself, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.

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".

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"),

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. Hume appeared on the day but, in the recollection of McCann, walked on the pavement alongside the march, "half there and half not". The Duke Street march sparked two days of street fighting as protesters and residents resisted the entry of the 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.

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. they believed he 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.—this would be on the basis of "the consent of the majority of the people in the North and in the South". Hume suggested to party activists that it was time to consider scrapping the 1920 Government of Ireland Act.

Responding to the developing campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Hume proposed that armed republicans could best serve the cause of Irish unity by disbanding: "violence and the threat of it only strengthens unionism, it only deepens and heightens sectarian divisions which represent the real border in our country". On 22 January 1972, he led protesters toward the perimeter of the Magilligan internment camp along Benone beach (reassured those who might wish to throw stones would have only sand underfoot). In the interim, Hume, together with Paddy Devlin, had his first experience of mediating between the Provisional IRA and the British government: 18 days of cease fire assisted contacts that PIRA decisively broke off with Bloody Friday. On 21 July, PIRA set off 21 bombs across Belfast killing 9 and injuring 130. On this basis, and following an election in June 1973 of a new Northern Ireland Assembly in which the SDLP emerged as the sole representatives of nationalist community, Hume and his colleagues reached an agreement to enter into "power sharing" executive with Unionists under their former Prime Minister Brian Faulkner as chief executive. SDLP leader Gerry Fitt was to be Faulkner's deputy, and Hume Minister of Commerce. The parties signed their coalition agreement at Sunningdale in England on 9 December and took up office on 1 January 1974. Hume had acted in direct defiance of PIRA intimidation. At the time of the agreement they had botched an attempt to kidnap his daughter Aine. In a case of mistaken identity, a schoolmate was bundled into a car and driven across the border. and at the same time to fend off the challenge from PIRA who were continuing to draw on public outrage over Bloody Sunday and the slow winding down of internment. In retrospect, Hume's party colleague, Social Services minister, Paddy Devlin regretted the SDLP had not "adopted a two stage approach, by allowing power sharing at Stormont to establish itself". He recalls all other considerations being overridden by the drive to get Council established in the hope of producing "the dynamic that would lead ultimately to an agreed united Ireland". Already in February, a surprise Westminster election had left Faulkner's pro Assembly grouping with just 13% of the unionist vote. Arguing that they had deprived Faulkner of any semblance of a mandate, the victorious United Ulster Unionist Coalition called for new Assembly elections. When these were refused, a loyalist coalition, the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC), called a general strike. Within two weeks the UWC, supported by the loyalist paramilitaries, had an effective stranglehold on energy supplies. Arguing with what Faulkner regarded as "exasperating dogmatism", Hume would neither delay the Council, nor accept the condition now sought for its introduction by pro executive unionists: the repeal of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution claiming Northern Ireland as the Republic's national territory. Instead, Hume pressed for a British Army enforced fuel oil plan and for resistance to "a fascist takeover". On 28 May, finding the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Mervyn Rees, willing neither to reopen political negotiations nor to confront the strikers, Faulkner resigned. Conceding that there was no longer any constitutional basis for the Executive, Rees dissolved the Assembly. Sinn Féin made its position clear. The "main purpose" of the new schools sector was "propagandistic". It was to "promote the British government's presentation internationally of the problem in the six counties as a religious one and deliberately to mislead people about the real sources of the problem". Hume remained ambivalent. He allowed that "insofar as it shows a determination to avoid sectarian conditioning", integrated schools were to be "welcomed". But under his leadership the SDLP did not commit to promote the new schools (and was to "surprise" Catholic clerics when it eventually did so in 2016).

In defending the Sunningdale agreement, Hume suggested that it had been "purely on the basis of [their] agreed economic and social policies that members of the executive had come together", and that to consider the case for state intervention, worker democracy and a radical approach to poverty they would do so again. When, in May 1979, Fitt likewise suggested that the SDLP, in prioritising the "Irish Dimension" over the trust required for power sharing, that it had become simply a "Catholic nationalist party", Hume replaced him as party leader. The changeover failed to quell dissention within the party: some members complained of Hume's style as autocratic and self promoting. While he admired Hume as an "original thinker", Austin Currie recalls that he was "extremely good at picking up points made by others and presenting them as his own". (In his personal memoirs, Hume passes over Currie and other of his one time fellow SDLP MPs with single references, including Seamus Mallon who served 22 years beside him in the party as deputy leader). He joined the Socialist Group in the Parliament, and for almost all his time as an MEP was a member of the group's bureau. In Europe, Hume found sufficient evidence that a "divided society [need not] be a violent one". He cited the accommodations between French and Flemish speakers in Belgium; between Madrid and Catalonia in Spain; and between Catholics, Protestants arid Socialists in the Netherlands, arguing: The one thing all these successful attempts at conflict resolution have in common is that these divided communities recognised the legitimacy of the position of their counterparts and set up structures that, by guaranteeing equality for all citizens, permitted the existence of a common citizenship. The essential element of their success has been to replace the concept of division with that of diversity. He saw the then European Community as, itself, an example of reconciliation through the construction of shared political and social institutions. Championing as an MEP protections for minority languages, Hume emphasised the "diversity" that could be accommodated.

Hume also saw the European project as an opportunity for representatives of the rival domestic traditions to cooperate in a context free of local prejudices and history. to whom, six months before, the U. S. State Department had denied a visa citing a "record of inflammatory actions and statements contrary to the interest of the United States in the achievement of a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland". In the United States, Hume had developed close relations with U. S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, U. S. Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, and New York Governor Hugh Carey (the "Four Horsemen"). With their support, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a statement promising U. S. assistance in the event of Northern Ireland reaching a new cross party agreement. Together with the continued swelling of support in Ireland and internationally as nine further hunger strikers died, by standing aside the SDLP is seen as having accommodated the first steps of the Provisional republican movement on the political path that would ultimately see Sinn Féin in 2007 supplant the party as the principal representative of nationalism. In the Westminster general election of June 1983, Hume saw off a challenge from Derry's sometime PIRA commander Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness in the newly created Westminster constituency of Foyle. But the same election saw Gerry Fitt, now and Independent, lose Belfast West to the new Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.

In January 1988, Hume and Adams were brought together at the Clonard Monastery in west Belfast by the Redemptorist priest Alec Reid. Through Reid, they exchanged documents outlining each party's position on ways to end the conflict. Hume again tackled Adams on the central premises of the PIRA campaign. It was not enough, he argued, to suggest that the British presence was the cause of all the violence in Ireland. The question was whether the provisional republican movement would take responsibility for the suffering and loss caused by the choices it had made in responding to that presence, and whether it would accept that the "armed struggle" had not advanced the agreement needed for the divided country to exercise its right to sovereignty. Their decision to use guns and bombs to "persuade" their Protestant fellow Irishmen is not only an example of an extreme lack of faith in their own beliefs or in the credibility of them, it is an attitude of extreme moral cowardice and a deeply partitionist attitude. For its real effect is to deepen the essential divisions among the Irish peopleHe proposed that if he were "to lead a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland today", it would be against the IRA. It is they [the IRA] who carry out the greatest infringements of human and civil rights, whether it is their murders, their executions without trial, their kneecappings and punishment shootings, their bombing of jobs and people. The most fundamental right is the right to life. Who in Northern Ireland takes most human lives in a situation where there is not one single injustice that justifies the taking of human life?The statistics, he observed, were "devastating": "people describing themselves as Irish republicans" had killed "six times as many human beings as the British army, thirty times as many as the RUC, and 250 times as many as the UDR" and, as for being "defenders" of their community, they had killed twice as many Catholics as the security forces and in the previous ten years more than the loyalists. Party colleague Seamus Mallon credited Hume for the perceived breakthrough. His leader had spent so much time and effort cultivating ties in Washington, New York and Boston because, with Britain reluctant to challenge the unionist veto, "the only place from where that pressure could come was from the US". He recalled that Thatcher (who in the Brighton bombing the year before had only narrowly escaped IRA assassination) had said after the implementation of the Anglo Irish agreement that "it was the American who made me do it. But her government's calculation may also been driven by the fear of Sinn Féin replacing the SDLP as the voice of northern nationalism.

In March 1991, the Ulster Unionists and Paisley's Democratic Unionists conceded Hume's conditions for political talks on the future of Northern Ireland. In their submission to the inter party talks in 1992, the Ulster Unionists (then still the largest party) said they could envisage a range of cross border bodies so long as these were under the control of the Northern Assembly, did not involve an overarching all Ireland Council, and were not designed to be developed in the direction of joint authority. In the course of the talks, Hume acknowledged the provisional republican movement as "the one organisation that could make the greatest contribution" to an agreed future (he also revealed to John Chilcott of the Northern Ireland Office, that he knew PIRA already had a back channel to the government through another St. Columb's old boy, Brendan Duddy). He secretly renewed contact with Adams. Again he challenged Adams and his comrades on their justifications for violence. Their "whataboutery" was unconvincing. British outrages should not be seen as providing the standards for republican behaviour. Together with the Alliance Party's John Alderdice, Hume joined Adams at an event hosted by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy at the Waldorf Astoria. Two months later the IRA declared a three day "cessation of hostilities" and then, believing that "an opportunity to secure a just and lasting settlement has been created", in August declared its first ceasefire since 1975. Adams acknowledged Hume's assistance "in the background" Adams, himself, greatly intensified pressure. In October 1993, PIRA Volunteer Thomas Begley was killed carrying a bomb into a shop on Belfast's Shankill Road that took the lives of nine other people and injured sixty. Pat Hume recalls that when, days later, her husband watched television footage of Adams carrying the coffin at Begley's funeral he started to cry: “He was not able to sleep. He was not eating properly. There were all sorts of vicious letters arriving in the post, vicious phone calls coming". In the Multi Party Agreement signed in Belfast on Good Friday, 10 April 1998, Hume and Adams conceded the Ulster Unionist conditions for cross border bodies, and the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution. In return, the unionists had to accept that a new power sharing executive would not, as in 1974, be a voluntary coalition. On a principle of elective inclusion which Hume and his SDLP team had been alone in proposing, seats at the ministerial table would be allocated to Assembly parties on the proportional D'Hondt system. This meant that unionists could not avoid sitting across from, and sharing office with, those they had continued to describe as "Sinn Féin IRA".

When on 1 July 1998, the new Northern Ireland Assembly nominated the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble as First Minister, it was expected that Hume, as the leader of the largest nationalist party, would assume the joint office of Deputy First Minister. Instead, he handed this role to Séamus Mallon. Some political journalists cited a "reserved" relationship between Hume and Trimble, despite the two men having together received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize. In their citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee observed that over the thirty years of national, religious and social conflict in Northern Ireland, John Hume had been "the clearest and most consistent of Northern Ireland’s political leaders in his work for a peaceful solution. The foundations of the peace agreement signed on Good Friday 1998 reflect principles which he has stood for". Hume has been the only person to combine the Nobel Peace Prize with two other major international peace awards, the Martin Luther Award (1999) and the Gandhi Peace Prize (2001). In 2010, Hume topped a viewer poll by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ as "Ireland's Greatest" ahead of Michael Collins, Mary Robinson, James Connolly, and Bono. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI made Hume a Knight Commander of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great.

On 4 February 2004, Hume announced his complete retirement from politics and was succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader. He did not contest the 2004 European election (when his seat was won by Bairbre de Brún of Sinn Féin), nor did he run in the 2005 general election, in which Mark Durkan retained the Foyle constituency for the SDLP. Hume and his wife, Pat, continued to be active in promoting European integration, issues around global poverty and the Credit Union movement. He was also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations. In retirement, he continued to speak publicly, including a visit to Seton Hall University in New Jersey in 2005, the first Summer University of Democracy of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 10–14 July 2006), and at St Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on 18 July 2007. A building added to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was named after him. Hume held the position of Club President of his local football team, Derry City F. C., which he supported all his life. He was a patron of the children's charity Plan International Ireland.

In 1960, Hume married Patricia "Pat" Hone (22 February 19382 September 2021), a primary school teacher, whom he had first met two years earlier at a dancehall in Muff, County Donegal. The couple had five children Thérèse, Áine, Aidan, John and Mo as well as 16 grandchildren and two great grandchildren. The family was not always shielded from the invective and threats directed John Hume. In addition to the attempted kidnapping of Áine in 1973, Thérèse Hume recalls: “a lot of threatening letters, threatening phone calls, bullets sent in the post one time, a couple of bullets sent at different times. That kind of thing was going on for quite a while and there was an undercurrent of nastiness”. Hume died in the early hours of 3 August 2020 at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour leader and prime minister Tony Blair said: "John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past." The Dalai Lama said on Twitter: "John Hume's deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow." Following the Good Friday Agreement, Hume's former Unionist ministerial colleague, Basil McIvor, allowed that Hume had been "a force in compelling Unionists, and rightly so, to engage in dialogue with their arch enemy, Sinn Féin".

Following the death of Pat Hume in September 2020, a John and Pat Hume Foundation for Peace and Reconciliation was launched by members of the Hume family, civil rights campaigners and former political colleagues. Prominent among the patrons were President Clinton's peace envoy, former US Senator George Mitchell, former Irish President Mary McAleese and Martin Luther King III, the son of the murdered U. S. civil rights leader. Current board members include former SDLP leader Mark Durkan, former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt, and Sara Canning, the partner of murdered journalist Lyra McKee. It describes its mission as supporting and inspiring "leadership for peaceful change", recognising that that "the most effective change makers are often Quiet Leaders – those who may not have an official role in their local power structure".

John Hume, Derry Beyond the Walls: Social and Economic Aspects of the Growth of Derry, Ulster Historical foundation, Belfast. 2002 1964 MA thesis for Maynooth College. John Hume, A City Solitary, BBC documentary script, broadcast on BBC and RTE 1964. John Hume, Personal Views, Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland, Town House, Dublin, 1996.