A bird’s eye view of where John Hume was born in 1937 goes a long way towards explaining his life. For if any place in the North had suffered the full political and economic consequences of partition, it was John Hume’s home city of Derry. 

It had a nationalist majority. It was cut off by the border from its natural hinterland of Donegal. It was also a treasured part of Unionist mythology as the ‘maiden city of the siege’.  Was it any wonder that Derry became the cockpit of a North that exploded in 1969?

And across the years, it seemed that the Northern crisis began and returned timelessly to Derry – civil rights, Bloody Sunday, and finally the Peace Process.  

Hume was born into it, into the poverty that was the lot of Derry’s Catholic majority. He grew up fully aware of the extensive political and economic chicanery employed by the Unionist establishment to control the city. It was a lesson about the power of votes that he never forgot. Catholics were overlooked for state housing and employment and somehow Derry’s Protestant minority had managed, by electoral boundary manipulation, to retain local political control.

From partition in 1921 until the sixties, the North remained frozen in history. Its artificial Unionist majority controlled the artificial state and the nationalist minority remained a political and cultural underclass. London and Dublin were forced to mind their own business, and, apart from the odd desultory IRA campaign, the North seemed politically impregnable. But post World War II, events were beginning to undermine that veneer, and John Hume was to become a major player as a result of those very events.

In conversation with me once, Hume outlined how the Martin Luther King non-violent Civil rights campaign in the USA seemed a perfect example for the North’s nationalist community to follow.

Hume was in the first ever generation of northern children to sit the 11-plus examination, which was created by the 1944 Westminster Butler Education Act. Truly revolutionary in its day, Butler enabled working class children to attend Grammar Schools for free. It was an educational reform that was to have, in the long run, an extraordinary and unforeseen impact on the North. Why? Because, within a generation, it created a first-ever professional Catholic middle class. 

In time this middle class would want their place in the sun, and that was to become a demand and a constituency that unionism could neither control nor contain. This emergence was the moment when the ‘old colony’ began to disintegrate.

The second and equally important change that also had a huge impact on the political crisis that Hume became a major player in was the economic change in the North that followed on from this educational revolution. Post-war across Europe, the old traditional industries owned by the local bourgeoisie were disappearing, replaced by the first generation of modern global technology. 

In the North, those old (traditionally mostly Unionist owned) shipbuilding, heavy engineering, ropes, linen, and clothes manufacturing operations were being replaced by European and US foreign direct investment. This did not only reduce labour numbers among a traditional Protestant workforce, but the foreign owned firms were reluctant to adhere to the North’s traditional old sectarian work practices. The Orange Lodge mentality did not like this new meritocracy. 

The result was the creation of a new generation of unemployed Protestant working classes, who, in frustration at the loss of traditional privilege, began to challenge the traditional Unionist political hegemony.

In Ian Paisley, they had a charismatic leader who in the thirty years to follow undermined every attempt by Unionism to reform an increasingly dysfunctional political inheritance. This constituency was in turn, as loyalist paramilitaries, to fire the first shots in what was to become ‘the Troubles’.

Two more events, both central to Derry’s fortunes catapulted Hume – by now an energetic if still non-political figure in the city’s emerging middle class – into frontline leadership. The 1965 decision by the Unionist government to build a new city called Craigavon beside solidly Unionist Portadown in deference to Derry’s appeals for housing and jobs was a bitter blow. 

A bigger insult was to follow when the government sited the North’s new second university at Coleraine instead of the second city of Derry. Hume had joined the university campaign and, through it, gained his first public prominence.

The sense of time running out was everywhere. Finally, on October 5th, 1968, Hume’s Derry was again the cockpit as the RUC beat up a Civil Rights March. With democratic politics stymied by the North’s intrinsic artificial majority plus the inability of Unionism – harangued by Paisleyism – to confront nationalist demands for equality, John Hume joined the thousands who took their politics to the streets. 

In conversation with me once, Hume outlined how the Martin Luther King non-violent Civil rights campaign in the USA seemed a perfect example for the North’s nationalist community to follow. Like King’s people, they too were rendered powerless both in terms of numbers and resulting from democratic failure.

Ever the student of history, Hume explained how Martin Luther King was inspired by Gandhi, who in turn had been inspired by Irish Republican Terence MacSwiney’s non-violent hunger-strike to the death in 1920. Civil Rights, Hume also insisted, was a moral issue as well as a political one, in that you were challenging a wider society to recognise a just cause.

But the North, much to Hume’s great chagrin, didn’t have a Congress in Washington prepared to act. The Civil Rights marches caused the Unionist establishment to draw up their bridges. Once again Derry became the cockpit. In 1969, within a year of that first Civil Rights march, the loyalist Apprentice Boys parade and the subsequent ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in Derry became the spark that set off a violent loyalist reaction in Belfast, where nationalist areas were attacked by both loyalist mobs and even some police.

Hume found the inspiration for this in the methodology that Europe had used to protect and involve its many post war minorities in new democratic settlements.

As both London and Dublin arose, shocked out of their political slumbers by events, the British army was hurried into Belfast and Derry to protect the nationalist areas. Catholic refugees fled across the border and Taoiseach Jack Lynch went on television to appeal for London to take responsibility.

It was the moment when the south first became deeply involved in the northern crisis. Within days, Hume was being quietly consulted by the southern political establishment and that initiated a relationship that he was to have with them for the following thirty years. 

*****

The late John Hume

In some ways Hume’s most significant political achievement was the extent to which he profoundly influenced Dublin’s politics in relation to the North. When Dublin was in trouble the response was usually ‘to ask Hume’. As the Northern crisis deepened, they recognised both his political acumen and his trustworthiness. 

By now Hume had realised that Northern street politics was insufficient and that a brand new political constituency was required to oppose unionism. Months in gestation, the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) emerged eventually.

It was a political party made on the hoof and dragged headfirst through crisis after crisis. It was a coalition of the North’s old nationalist Hibernian tradition with a sprinkling of social democrats and a few labour advocates. On reflection now, unionism could hardly have had a more sympathetic and understanding leadership of nationalist opinion than John Hume to deal with – yet time after time, his overtures were spurned. 

But the events of 1969 were also to have a profound reaction in the nationalist community. The Civil Rights campaign had politicised huge numbers – many for the first time – and for the first time too since partition the minority had lost their sense of powerlessness. Their crisis had become both national and international.

In this Hume’s political analysis was critical. His compelling political genius was to subject all the arguments to common sense. The North’s original partionist settlement was simply no longer credible or sufficient to the needs of the two communities; a brand new political structure was required.

Hume found the inspiration for this in the methodology that Europe had used to protect and involve its many post war minorities in new democratic settlements. Few could disagree with the proposition that, as a political scientist, Hume was probably without equal in political life. We owe the intricacies of the Peace Process to Hume’s late-night homework.

But the August 1969 attacks on the nationalist community also had another consequence that sent Irish political life spiralling back to the past. The Republican movement had always been a minority in the North beside the nationalist Hibernian tradition. But the attacks on the Belfast nationalist communities, a repeat of events both in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the context of the new political hopes that the civil rights movement had engendered, was a very bitter pill to swallow. 

When he sat down with Gerry Adams, it was the leader of the Irish political tradition sitting down with the leader of the Irish armed struggle tradition

A tiny number of the surviving armed struggle veterans of the failed sixties IRA campaign saw their opportunity. If John Hume was attempting to re-cast the North’s crisis in a new, post war European political constituency, they only saw it in starkest traditional colours. The Provisional IRA emerged out of a division within the Republican movement and graduated from defence committees to armed struggle.

Importantly, they were guided in the beginning by a southern leadership who saw the campaign in the North as a continuation of the struggle defeated back in the Irish Civil War.

To make matters worse, the British army, largely at the behest of Unionist flailing around for a political response, began to confront the nationalist community. Once again Derry was to light the flame, the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday killings was a fully armed Republican confrontation with the British state.

It was to be 25 years before that could be halted. Historians will long argue about why it took so long but once again it was Hume, whose tenacity not to mention his courage was central to its resolution. His approach was both novel and revelatory. 

When he sat down with Gerry Adams, it was the leader of the Irish political tradition sitting down with the leader of the Irish armed struggle tradition. Hume uniquely insisted at the start of their dialogue that essentially this was now an ‘all-Irish’ conversation about how we the ‘Irish’ could resolve our divisions before we even sat down with the British. 

Hume’s logic was compelling in that he argued that this was not 1920 in a west Cork or a Tipperary, but that this was an armed struggle in utterly different circumstances. Hume’s luck was in for once, because, in many ways, he was taking up a conversation that the Republican movement was already having within its ranks. Many of its members were reaching double figures behind prison walls and did they want the next generation taking the same path?

*****

Given too that the political establishments in both London and Dublin had locked out the Republican constituency in advance of a ceasefire, Hume’s courage was immense in that he was also prepared – almost alone among the establishment – to abandon the orthodoxy that any lasting peace was possible without the Republicans being brought into the political process. 

His authority and his personal weapons, apart from his skill and personality, to carry off this remarkable political achievement were the sum of his decades in America and Europe. Hume internationalised the ‘Irish Troubles’. He created space and got attention at the centre of world affairs for the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ – as Churchill had depicted them. 

Derry has always had close links with emigration and with America; during the Famine, thousands had sailed out of there to the new world. Hume’s historical sense of the importance of the diaspora, especially our political diaspora in America, was of immense importance. 

His resume exceeded anything any other Irish politician had achieved becoming a truly international political heavyweight.

As a student of history, he was familiar with its historic role – from the emergence of the Fenians in the 19th century through to De Valera’s visits in the 1920’s. The American Irish was to become Hume’s secret weapon and by putting thousands of miles on the clock, he assembled a standing army of senators and congressional members. 

He told me once that the day he first warmly shook hands with the grandchild of Donegal famine emigrants, the famous Democrat House Speaker Tipp O’Neill, he felt an extraordinary sense of history powering through him. Of all the doors in America, he was now inside one of the most powerful imaginable. The Kennedys came onside, then people like Patrick Moynihan, Hugh Carey and Chris Dodd. 

Then came the Clinton Presidency, which was extraordinarily important, especially since London had spent years trying to stop the internationalisation of the Irish situation. Such was Hume’s canvassing powers in America that the constant complaint of British embassy officials was that Hume had already briefed important Americans ahead of them getting there.

He repeated the scenario in Europe making friends and building relationships. His great secret weapon was the visit to Derry, to come and see Columba’s city of the hill with the splendid Foyle flowing down from the city and off to sea. For example, recently, when Hume was gravely ill, Ireland was conducting its Brexit conversations with a man who counted Hume as a personal friend and a Derry visitor, Michel Barnier. Seemingly once again he had done the groundwork. 

So when Hume finally sat down with Adams to unpick the knot, he had on his team a truly extraordinary collection of European and American political heavyweights. His resume exceeded anything any other Irish politician had achieved becoming a truly international political heavyweight.

In death, Hume is being eulogised as the man who made peace, but his achievement is far greater than that. Half a century ago he stepped out from a community rendered powerless by history and began assembling an astonishingly and unlikely political construct. In the end, it stretched across two continents and included a collection of international political heavyweights. John Hume’s monument is about the power of political persuasion and the primacy of democratic institutions. 

The influence continues. Currently the power behind the throne in the Joe Biden Presidency campaign is another close Hume friend, the former Senator Chris Dodd. All of Dodd’s grandparents came from Ireland. No wonder the New York Times was commenting last Monday – in a piece pointing up why Boris Johnson is concerned about a Biden Presidency – that ‘there are potential land mines, not least Northern Ireland. A devoted Irish-American, Mr Biden will fiercely defend Ireland’s interests, as will his allies in the Democratic Party’s Irish lobby on Capitol Hill’. 

And the Times continued: ‘In speeches, Mr Biden’s go-to literary reference is from ‘‘Easter 1916,’’ a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats about the Irish uprising against British rule’. Clearly the ghost of John Hume will go marching on.