John Hume (18 January 1937 – 3 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.
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.
First civic and political engagement
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".
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".
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.
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.