Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family inDerry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie" (née Doherty), a seamstress, and Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker.[5] He had a mostlyIrish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, aScottishPresbyterian who migrated toCounty Donegal.[6]
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 isgerrymandered. My crowd is getting no show at all. There must be a reason for this. And, of course, John got into all that.[7]: 19
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.[10]
In 1960, aged 23, Hume helped establish the DerryCredit Union, the first cooperative community bank inNorthern Ireland. Pooling their resources, working people were able to create a low-interest alternative to moneylenders and pawn shops.[11] Such was the success of this exercise in what he represented as "practical Christianity" (and as "Catholic in origin"),[12]: 19–20 that within four years Hume had become the youngest ever President of theIrish 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".[13]
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 theBBC andRTÉ.[7]: 31–32 It persuadedThe Irish Times to open its pages to the "first considered statement" of Hume's political views[14]: 33–34
In "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 thenationalist policy of non-recognition andabstention. Determined to engage the great social problems of housing, unemployment and emigration, they were willing to accept "theProtestant tradition in the North as legitimate" and thatIrish unity should be achieved only "by the will of the Northern majority."[15]
"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 governingunionists 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.[14]: 34
Involved involuntary housing movement in his home city, Hume argued that (notwithstanding "excellent assistance" form the Ministry of Development),[12]: 20 he battled the same sectarian-political logic within Derry itself. A unionist minority secured majority control of the city council throughgerrymandering which involved restricting planning permission for potential Catholic homes.[14]: 38–39 [18]: 648
On 5 October 1968, the Derry Labour Party andDerry Housing Action Committee proceeded with a march in the city, originally sponsored by theNorthern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), in defiance of a last-minute order by the government alarmed at the prospect of a clash with paradingApprentice 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 socialistEamon McCann.[7]: 48 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".[19]: 91 Hume appeared on the day but, in the recollection of McCann, walked on the pavement alongside the march, "half there and half not".[7]: 53–54
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 BelfastRepublican Labour MPGerry Fitt, hit twice on the head and hospitalised)[12]: 76 was defiance of the initial order to disperse.[20] The Duke Street march sparked two days of street fighting as protesters and residents resisted the entry of theRoyal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into the CatholicBogside. Hume, elected vice-chair of a new Citizens’ Action Committee (CAC), called for asit-down protest at theGuildhall 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.[21][12]: 102–107
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 therates-based franchise in council elections, and a review of the broad security provisions of theSpecial Powers Act.[22] When these reforms were placed in jeopardy by the internal unionist dissension, and a snap election was called byPrime MinisterTerence O'Neill, Hume decided to enter electoral politics.[14]: 39
In theFebruary 1969 poll, he secured 55 percent of the vote in his homeFoyle constituency against 33 percent for the standing MP and long-time leader of theNationalist Party,Eddie McAteer, and 12 percent for McCann of theNorthern 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 theBattle of the Bogside.[18]: 666–667
In the election Hume had presented himself as anindependent, but his immediate objective was the formation of a broad-based party that could advance the wider reform he believed necessary.[14]: 39
According to Devlin, this formation 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 forLondonderry. The others were of the view that the civil-rights campaignerClaude Wilton was the more credible candidate. They believed a Protestant, who, as anUlster Liberal, had taken more than a third of the vote in the constituency the year before,[23] 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 withGerry Quigley'sNational 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.[24]: 140–141 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.[7]: 89
Not embraced in the new party wasBernadette Devlin. Devlin had made international headlines, aged 21, as the youngest MP to enter the BritishHouse of Commons following her victory in April 1969 as the "Unity" candidate in aMid Ulsterby-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 theInternational Socialists in Britain", Hume described her as a "disaster".[7]: 73
Neither did the new party extend to those, previously pro-O'Neill unionists, nationalists and rights activists, who in April 1970 formed theAlliance Party. They had courted Hume, but he refused the invitation to join their cross-community grouping.[7]: 84–85 With his colleagues, Hume insisted that, like Alliance, they would prioritise the socio-economic above the constitutional question. While they were committed to "eventual" Irish unification—to a new all-Ireland constitution that would provide "the framework for the emergence of a just, egalitarian and secular society"[25]—this would be on the basis of "the consent of the majority of the people in the North and in the South".[24]: 142 As a further token of their cross-communitybona fides, Hume cited the fact that Cooper, among other founding members, was Protestant, evidence, he suggested, that "the important issue" for the party was "human rights not religion".[14]: 57
In June 1971, while he appeared to join his colleagues in responding positively to the offer of Prime MinisterBrian Faulkner to more fully engage them in parliament through committees,[26]: 36–42 Hume suggested to party activists that it was time to consider scrapping theGovernment of Ireland Act 1920.[7]: 93 With Fitt, Devlin was wary of what he called "the old nationalist knee-jerk of abstention", and of appearing to give the "gunmen" a mandate.[24]: 155–156, 138 But when in July the Unionist government refused to authorise a public inquiry into the fatal shooting by theBritish Army of two men in Derry, Hume carried the day and led the SDLP out of Stormont, declaring it unreformable.[26]: 45–55 [27]
Response to the onset of the Provisional campaign and to internment
Responding to the developing campaign of theProvisional 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 heightenssectarian divisions which represent the real border in our country".[14]: 58 Taking issue with the essential premise of PIRA's "drive-out-the-Brits" strategy, he argued:
[T]he struggle againstpartition is not, as thestruggle for independence was, a struggle against a foreign and occupying power. It is a struggle to bring together two sections of the Irish people, and how can anyone imagine ... that violence by one section against the other can unite them. Reform and reconciliation are the only way ....[14]: 59
In relation to those "who have no respect for human life and seem to think that human lives are expendable as a means of achieving political ends," there should be no "fence-sitting."[14]: 60–61
At the same time, Hume expressed outrage at the government's resort in August 1971 to apolicy of internment that saw large numbers of Catholics detained and sometimes brutally interrogated.[28][29] On 22 January 1972, he led protesters toward the perimeter of theMagilligan internment camp alongBenone beach (reassured those who might wish to throw stones would have only sand underfoot).[7]: 100 They were driven back with baton charges and canisters ofCS gas. Fearing the consequences ("if they stopped a march on the beach, what were they going to do in the city"),[7]: 101 a week later Hume sat out a NICRA organised march in Derry. At the end the day,Sunday 30 January 1972, theParachute Regiment had shot 26 unarmed civilians, killing 14. Faced with a choice between "repression or change of system", it was evident to Hume that the British as choosing repression.[14]: 62 He compared the killings to the 1960Sharpeville massacre inSouth Africa.[7]: 104 Yet in the wake ofBloody Sunday, he continued to insist on a non-violent response. In August 1972, his party initiated a campaign ofcivil disobedience that by October had 16,000 households withholding council house rent andrates.[28]
In March 1972, the London government prorogued the Northern Ireland Parliament and imposed direct rule "not merely to restore order but to reshape the Province's system of government".[30] In the interim, Hume, together withPaddy 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 withBloody Friday. On 21 July, PIRA set off 21 bombs across Belfast killing 9 and injuring 130.[7]: 110
In October 1972, the government brought out aGreen Paper,The Future of Northern Ireland, which seemed to embrace much of Hume's analysis.[14]: 80 While Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as that is the wish of a majority of the people, the government would take into account the "Irish Dimension" of the unfolding crisis. It would seek to accommodate the legitimate interests both of the minority in Northern Ireland that saw themselves as "simply part of the wider Irish community", and of theRepublic of Ireland to whom it committed to make any new arrangements "as far as possible acceptable".[31]
On this basis, and following anelection in June 1973 of a newNorthern Ireland Assembly in which the SDLP emerged as the sole representatives of the nationalist community, Hume and his colleagues reached an agreement to enter into "power-sharing" executive withUnionists under their formerPrime MinisterBrian Faulkner as chief executive.SDLP leaderGerry Fitt was to be Faulkner's deputy, and Hume Minister of Commerce. The parties signed their coalitionagreement 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 acrossthe border.[32][7]: 115
From the outset of the negotiations, Hume had been under pressure to demonstrate that there was a prospective path to ending partition. There was a need to respond to the general "unificationist feeling" among nationalists that had followed the closure ofStormont,[33]: 39 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.[7]: 110 [19]: 141
Hume highlighted the agreement's return to an original feature of theGovernment of Ireland Act 1920, theCouncil of Ireland. He described the cross border ministerial and parliamentary forum as "a continuing conference table" at which "Catholic, Protestant,Planter andGael" could explore the bases for unity.[14]: 86 But more than a talking shop, it was to have real executive, harmonising and supervisory powers. Convinced that policing in nationalist areas now required supra-national legitimation, Hume proposed, for example, that the Council have control of thePolice Authority for Northern Ireland.[34]: 96 [35]
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".[24]: 205
Already in February, asurprise 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 victoriousUnited Ulster Unionist Coalition called for new Assembly elections. When these were refused, a loyalist coalition, theUlster Workers' Council (UWC), called a general strike. Within two weeks the UWC, supported by theloyalist paramilitaries, had an effective stranglehold on energy supplies.[36] Arguing with what Faulkner regarded as "exasperating dogmatism",[37]: 428 Hume would neither delay the Council, nor accept the condition now sought for its introduction by pro-executive unionists: the repeal ofArticles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution claiming Northern Ireland as the Republic's national territory.[38] Instead, Hume pressed for a British Army enforced fuel-oil plan and for resistance to "a fascist takeover".[39][40]
On 28 May, finding the newNorthern 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.[24]: 242–247 [37]: 425–426 Hume continued to insist that the executive might have survived had Rees taken a tougher stand.[7]: 140 His Unionist colleague on the executive,Basil McIvor, argued rather that it was Hume who had blown "out the light at the end of the tunnel", that for the survival power sharing Hume's "grim and unbending" insistence on the Council had been "disaster".[34]: 104
During his brief career in government, there was an issue on which Hume was reportedly at odds, not only with his Unionist colleagues, but also with those in own party, including Devlin.[24]: 222 As Minister of Education, McIvor had proposed a third type of school. In addition to the existing (Catholic) Maintained Schools and the (non-Catholic) Controlled Schools, there should be "shared schools", "available to Catholic and Protestant parents alike who wished to have their children educated together". Disregarding a message fromCardinal William Conway "not to interfere with the schools", McIvor brought the proposal to the Executive where he recalls it being welcomed by all, save Hume. Hume was "less than enthusiastic".[34]: 113
In 1989, the year in which Westminster created a statutory framework for what was now calledintegrated education,[41]: 10 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".[42] While this appeared to go to the heart of the Provisionals' disagreement with Hume, and while integrationists broadly shared Hume's view of sectarian division as "the real border",[43][44] Hume remained ambivalent. He allowed that "insofar as it shows a determination to avoid sectarian conditioning", integrated schools were to be "welcomed".[42] 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).[45]
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.[9]: 88 Paddy Devlin was not convinced: arguing that the SDLP “was being stripped of its socialism and being taken over by unadulterated nationalists”, he resigned from the party in 1977.[46] When, in May 1979, Fitt likewise suggested that the SDLP, in prioritising the "Irish Dimension" over the trust required for power sharing,[47]: 99 [7]: 140 had gone "too green",[48] that it had become simply a "Catholic nationalist party",[49] Hume replaced him as party leader.[50]
The changeover failed to quell dissension within the party: some members complained of Hume's style as autocratic and self promoting.[51] 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".[52] In his personal memoirs,[53] Hume passes over Currie and other of his one-time fellow SDLP MPs with single references, includingSeamus Mallon who served 22 years beside him in the party as deputy leader.[16]: 19
As party leader, biographers suggest that his metier was the mass media. In the "intimacy of the television studio", his skills as a lobbyist and as a committee man "came into their own".[54] While Mallon observed that his party leader "didn't take criticism well – in fact he wouldn't take it at all",[55] Hume offered it as his "golden rule" in broadcast interviews never to get angry, anger being the surest indication that you had lost the argument.[56]
In June 1979, Hume was elected (with 24.6% of first preference votes) as one of Northern Ireland's threeMembers of the European Parliament. He was to hold his seat inStrasbourg for five terms, until his retirement in 2004.[57] He joined theSocialist Group in the Parliament, and for almost all his time as an MEP was a member of the group's bureau.[58]
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.[59]
He saw the thenEuropean 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.[60]: 110
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.[14]: 104 In lobbying for special economic development assistance for Northern Ireland, he gave practical demonstration of this by working closely with his two unionistMEP colleagues. This included the man regarded at home as his nemesis, the leader of theDemocratic Unionist Party,Ian Paisley.[58] In September 1983, Hume went on a nine-day investment promotion tour of North America in the company of Paisley[61] to whom, six months before, theU.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".[62]
In the United States, Hume had developed close relations withU.S. House SpeakerTip O'Neill,U.S. SenatorsTed Kennedy andDaniel Moynihan, andNew York GovernorHugh Carey (the "Four Horsemen").[63] 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.[14]: 104 They were also supported Hume in his efforts to dissuade Irish Americans from funding the Provisional republican movement. He cautioned those contributing toNORAID that they were supporting a "vicious parody" ofIrish republicanism that, as first set forth by theUnited Irishmen, properly rests on the "brotherhood" of Catholic and Protestant.[14]: 103
When in March 1981,Sinn Féin put forward PIRAhunger-strikerBobby Sands as theAnti H-Block candidate for aFermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, Hume prevented his party colleague,Austin Currie, from entering the contest.[51] In what he regarded as "a no-win situation", Hume also deferred to Sinn Féin's nominated successor for the seat,Owen Carron, when a month after his election Sands died.[47]: 123–124 "Sometimes", Hume later commented, "in politics you are faced with two wrong choices".[7]: 166 Papers reveal that Irish ministers and officials regarded this at the time as a mistake and as "a major triumph for the IRA".[64] 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 seeSinn Féin in 2007 supplant the party as the principal representative of nationalism.[65]: 525–526 [66][67]
In January 1988, Hume and Adams were brought together at theClonard Monastery in west Belfast by theRedemptorist priestAlec Reid.[69][70] 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 the North. 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.[14]: 198–200
When Adams and Sinn Féin leadership refused to accept the need for an end to the PIRA campaign, when it was clear that their strategy would remain that of "the ballot boxand the armalite", Hume publicly restated his moral and political rejection of their methods.[71]
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 people.
He 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, theirkneecappings andpunishment 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 theUDR" 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.[14]: 203–204
In theNew Ireland Forum, an SDLP conference with the southern partiesFianna Fáil,Fine Gael, andLabour, Hume affirmed the principle that a new Ireland could be achieved only with unionist agreement and support: "we seek a solution, not a victory".[14]: 142 (Later, in response to Sinn Féin, he was to caution against underestimating the challenge involved: Ulster Protestants had their own "deep-seated and deeply felt reasons" to "wish to live apart from the rest of the people of Ireland").[72]
Yet a month later, in June 1983, Hume in his maiden speech in theBritish House of Commons, and in subsequent debates, called on the government to reconsider its consistent policy--"that there will be no change in the constitutional position of the Northern Ireland without the majority's consent". This might seem democratic but, given the "majority that is being guaranteed was created artificially by a sectarian headcount", he argued that it sustained a "solidified sectarianism".[14]: 158
In November 1985, the government appeared to relent. Disregarding universal unionist opposition, Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher signed anagreement with theIrish Taoiseach,Garret FitzGerald that for the first time gave the Republic a direct role in the government of Northern Ireland. AnAnglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, with a locally basedsecretariat, would invite the Irish government to "put forward views on proposals" for major legislation concerning Northern Ireland. Proposals, however, would only be on matters that are "not the responsibility of a devolved administration in Northern Ireland". The implication for unionists was that if they wished to limit Dublin's influence, they would have to climb down from insistence on majority rule and think again as to how nationalists might be accommodated.[73]
Party colleagueSeamus 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 theBrighton 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.[74][75] But her government's calculation may also been driven by the fear of Sinn Féin replacing the SDLP as the voice of northern nationalism.[37]: 427
However, in the wake of the Agreement, Mallon appears to have accorded the border question greater urgency than Hume. At a meeting in London (where Mallon for the first time was taking his Westminster seat forNewry and Armagh), Hume, according to their host, Irish AmbassadorNoel Dorr, proposed that "the concept of [Irish] unity is more important as a factor in what he called 'the tribal conflict' than in itself". His people in Derry had closer links withGlasgow than the west of Ireland or even Dublin, and knew that "the time is not right" for unity. For Mallon, who "spoke of the desire for Irish unity as a deep motivating force North and South of the border", the Agreement was "a kind of last throw by constitutional Irish nationalism". For his leader it was "a new beginning rather than a last opportunity" and, should it fail, "another agreement" securing Dublin's advisory role would follow.[76]
In March 1991, the Ulster Unionists and Paisley'sDemocratic Unionists conceded Hume's conditions for political talks on the future of Northern Ireland.[77] 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.[78]
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 toJohn Chilcott of theNorthern Ireland Office, that he knew PIRA already had a back channel to the government through another St.Columb's old boy,Brendan Duddy).[79] 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.[14]: 243
Over British objections, in January 1994President Clinton allowed Adams to make the journey Hume had been taking since the 1970s. Although it was on a 48-hour visa limited to New York City, Adams has described his visit to the United States as "pivotal" to the subsequent peace process.[80] Together with theAlliance Party'sJohn Alderdice, Hume joined Adams at an event hosted by theNational Committee on American Foreign Policy at theWaldorf Astoria.[81][82] 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 itsfirst ceasefire since 1975.[83]
Adams acknowledged Hume's assistance "in the background"[80] and, after their contact was exposed (in April 1993, Adams had been spotted going into Hume's house in Derry),[32] the extent to which Hume was "pilloried, vilified and condemned" by the British government, by most political parties and by large sections of the media.[84] Adams, himself, greatly intensified pressure. In October 1993, PIRA VolunteerThomas Begley was killed carryinga 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".[32]
At the time of theAugust 1994 ceasefire, Hume and Adams issued a joint declaration. It affirmed that a lasting settlement had to be based "on the right of the Irish people as a whole to national self-determination", but conceded Hume's consistent position.
The exercise of this right [to self-determination] is, of course, a matter for agreement between all the people of Ireland and we reiterate that such a new agreement is only viable if it enjoys the allegiance of the different traditions on this island by accommodating diversity and providing for national reconciliation.[14]: 265
PIRA twice disrupted what was now referred to as the "peace process" by ending their ceasefire, which in turn reinforced the Unionists in their demand that PIRA disarm as a condition of Sinn Féin's admission to inter-party talks. Hume helped get around this by proposing aninternational body on arms decommissioning to be headed by President Clinton's envoy to the peace process,Senator George Mitchell.[14]: 282–284 (After Trimble resigned as First Minister in 2001, bringing down the first,UUP-SDLP-led, post-Agreement executive, Mitchell's report was the basis on which PIRA finally agreed procedures to put its weaponry "beyond use", a process not completed until 2005).[85]
In theMulti-Party Agreement signed inBelfast onGood Friday, 10 April 1998, Hume and Adams conceded the Ulster Unionist conditions for cross-border bodies,[86]: 1155–1157 [87] and theamendment 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,[88] seats at the ministerial table would be allocated to Assembly parties on the proportionalD'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".[89]
When on 1 July 1998, the newNorthern Ireland Assembly nominated the Ulster Unionist leader,David Trimble asFirst 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 toSéamus Mallon. Some political journalists cited a "reserved" relationship between Hume and Trimble, despite the two men having together received the 1998Nobel Peace Prize.[90]
In their citation, theNorwegian 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".[91]
Hume has been the only person to combine the Nobel Peace Prize with two other major international peace awards, theMartin Luther Award (1999) and theGandhi Peace Prize (2001).[92]
In 1960, Hume married Patricia "Pat" Hone (22 February 1938 – 2 September 2021), a primary school teacher, whom he had first met two years earlier at a dancehall inMuff, County Donegal. The couple had five children - Thérèse, Áine, Aidan, John and Mo - as well as 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.[104] 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”.[32]
In 2015, Hume was diagnosed withAlzheimer's disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s.[105] Hume died in the early hours of 3 August 2020 at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83.[106]
On his death, formerLabour leader and prime ministerTony Blair said: "John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past."[107] TheDalai Lama said onTwitter: "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."[108]
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".[34]: 105 Hume's deputy, and successor as SDLP party leader,Seamus Mallon suggested that this was at the cost of "almost validating" what the PIRA had done over the past 30 years. But Hume, in Mallon's view, had been "no fool". If he allowed himself to be played by Gerry Adams and the Provisional movement to gain respectability, it had been in the conviction that "if it saved a single life" any sacrifice made by his own party was worth it.[109]
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 werePresident Clinton's peace envoy, former US SenatorGeorge Mitchell, former Irish PresidentMary McAleese andMartin Luther King III, the son of themurdered U.S. civil rights leader.[110] Current board members include former SDLP leaderMark Durkan, former Ulster Unionist leaderMike Nesbitt, and Sara Canning, the partner of murdered journalistLyra McKee.[111] It describes its mission as supporting and inspiring "leadership for peaceful change", recognising that "the most effective change-makers are often Quiet Leaders – those who may not have an official role in their local power structure".[112]
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^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,ISBN978-0-9515549-0-6
^abBardon, Jonathan (1992).A History of Ulster. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.ISBN0856404764.
^abMcCann, Eamon (1993).War and an Irish Town. London: Pluto.ISBN9780745307251.
^Bew, Paul; Gillespie, Gordon (1993). "1968".Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968–1993. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan. p. 10.ISBN0-7171-2081-3.
^abcdMcIvor, Basil (1998).Hope Deferred, Experiences of an Irish unionist. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.ISBN0856406201.
^Hayes, Maurice (2015). "No! Minister". In Farren, Sean; Haughey, Denis (eds.).John Hume, Irish Peacemaker. Four Courts Press. p. 74.ISBN9781846825866.
^Anderson, Don (1994).Fourteen May Days: The Inside Story of the Loyalist Strike of 1974. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.ISBN0-7171-2177-1.
^abcElliott, Marianne (2000).The Catholics of Ulster, A History. Penguin.ISBN0713994649.
^Currie, Austin (2004).All Hell Will Break Loose. Dublin: O'Brien Press. p. 206.ISBN978-0862788155.
^Hume, John (1996),Personal Views, Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland, Town House, Dublin,ISBN978-1570981104
^Arthur, Paul (2015). "Political Apprenticeship". In Farren, Sean; Haughey, Denis (eds.).John Hume, Irish Peacemaker. Four Courts Press. p. 49.ISBN9781846825866.
^Bartlett, Thomas (2010).Ireland, a History. Cambridge University Press.ISBN9780521197205.
^Maillot, Agnès (20 December 2014)."Sinn Féin's Tortuous Road to Power".Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone – Literature, History of Ideas, Images and Societies of the English-speaking World.XII (8).doi:10.4000/lisa.7024.ISSN1762-6153.
^Feeney, Brian (2002).Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years. O'Brien Press. pp. 290–291.ISBN9781853718137.
^Keefe, Patrick (2018).Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. London: William Collins. pp. 127–128.ISBN9780008159269.
^Mansergh, Martin (2002), "Mountain Climbing Irish Style: The Hidden Challenges of the Peace Process", in Marianne Elliott ed.,The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland, Liverpool University Press, p. 110,ISBN978-0-85323-677-1
^Address to the SDLP annual conference, 1988, quoted in Farren (2021), pp. 202-204
^Durkan, Mark (2015). "Shaping the Peace". In Farren, Sean; Haughey, Denis (eds.).John Hume, Irish Peacemaker. Four Courts Press. p. 126.ISBN9781846825866.
^Aughey, Arthur (1989).Under Siege: Ulster Unionism and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Belfast: Blacksaff Press.
^Gudgin, Graham (1995). "Peace beyond Paper". In Foster, John (ed.).The Idea of the Union. Belcouver Press. pp. 104–115.ISBN0-9699464-0-6.
^Taylor, Peter (2023).Operation Chiffon: The Secret Soty of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 222.ISBN9781526659637.
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