Blessed are the Peacemakers

John Hume: The Persuader
Stephen Walker
Gill Books
Oct. 2023
432 pages
ISBN 978-0717196081

---

I will start this review by saying that like so many others I have been a great admirer of John Hume for decades. Reading this book over the Christmas period did nothing to lessen my admiration – it increased it. As well as chronicling John Hume’s very public life from 1968 onwards, it also enters into his home and family life in Derry through over a hundred interviews with family members, people who knew him well, colleagues and political opponents. Stephen Walker freely acknowledges the benefit to him of being able to use the transcripts of twenty five interviews conducted on behalf of Gill Books over twenty years ago. They and the many interviews he conducted himself enrich the book and make it eminently readable.

The book opens with a prologue which describes how on a Saturday in February 1992, Hume was on the point of giving up the leadership of his party – he was exhausted, frustrated by the lack of political progress and deeply upset by the criticism from within his own party and from media, particularly the Irish media, over his continued dialogue with Sinn Féin/IRA. He had his resignation speech prepared and his wife Pat could see that he really did want to quit. She called Mark Durkan who years later would lead the SDLP and follow Hume as MP for Derry, who sensing Pat’s agitation was at the Hume home in minutes. Durkan brilliantly used “John Hume tactics” on the man himself arguing among other things that one shouldn’t react to reaction and that it would be calamitous for the peace process if he were to walk away at that juncture. Mercifully, Hume agreed that he would consider it over the weekend. The rest is history.

The opening chapters deal with John Hume’s childhood, his education in St Columb’s, Derry and his three years in the seminary in Maynooth. He was a keen student of French, a genuine Francophile, indeed a Europhile long before he became a Member of the European Parliament. On leaving Maynooth he taught in Strabane for a period, but was soon offered a job teaching French and History in his old school, St Columb’s in the heart of Derry. By 1960  he was a married man, had completed an MA and was one of the founders of Derry’s Credit Union having seen the difficulty many of his fellow citizens had in securing loans to help their impoverished situation.

Fellow Derryman and life long friend, the singer/songwriter Phil Coulter is quoted in the book as saying “There would be no John Hume without Pat” such was the inestimable contribution Pat (née Hone) was to make. They were married in 1960 and she was his anchor for over sixty years of their married life. In the inherently chaotic situation for any politician in Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century, especially one who spent so much time travelling to mainland Britain, Europe and the USA the need for such a stable bedrock of support was clear. In many ways, Pat Hume is the almost unseen star of this book’s story.

John Hume and others were catapulted to the world’s attention by the events of 5 October 1968 when a march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was met by brutal treatment by the police. The march was banned by the Stormont Government which had been in power for an uninterrupted forty-seven years since partition. The scenes of peaceful protestors being brutally treated by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary went round the world. The Unionist/Loyalist reaction was to assume (wrongly) that the Civil Rights Association was a front for the IRA and during subsequent Civil Rights protests counter demonstrations led by among others the Reverend Ian Paisley meant that as the year 1968 drew to a close tensions were heightened. Eventually the then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill called a General Election and John Hume was elected M.P. for Foyle unseating the long time incumbent, the Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer.

During subsequent years, as tensions in Northern Ireland worsened and the violence between the Provisional IRA, the various Loyalist groups and the British Army led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of people being seriously injured, John Hume rose to become the leading voice of opposition to Unionist hegemony there. In 1970, he and five other Stormont MPs formed the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). They were the most articulate spokesmen for the Nationalist people who still suffered discrimination in many areas despite reforms being introduced by the British Government.

This period saw the introduction of internment without trial, the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry where fourteen unarmed protestors were killed by members of the Parachute Regiment and the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin.

In late 1973 after elections to the Assembly and the negotiations between the British and Irish Governments and the main parties in the North that led to the Sunningdale Agreement, a Power Sharing Executive was formed in which Hume was named Minister of Commerce. The Executive comprising Official Unionist, SDLP and Alliance Party members was, however, short lived after Northern Ireland was brought to a standstill by the Ulster Workers’ Council strike and the minority UK Government of Harold Wilson capitulated.

By now Hume’s reputation as both an astute and articulate politician and one firmly committed to peace was firmly established. In time his stature was further enhanced when elected as one of three Northern Ireland members of the European Parliament; one of the others being Ian Paisley whose election performance showed his enormous popularity. In time Hume and Paisley would cooperate with each other in the best interests of the Northern Ireland economy, but by now, Hume was also turning his eyes on Irish America.  There, Noraid was actively supporting IRA violence but Hume had the ears of the hugely influential politicians known as the Four Horsemen: Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy. Daniel Moynihan and Hugh Carey. His lobbying actually started during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977-81) and during Ronald Reagan’s second term he (Reagan) influenced the staunchly Unionist minded Margaret Thatcher to negotiate the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985 where for the first time the Irish Government had an input into Northern Irish affairs. Hume’s hand was evident in the Agreement, a culmination of well over a decade’s work, often against the odds. The Agreement was seen as a betrayal by Unionist politicians whose MPs resigned their seats at Westminster en masse and forced a series of by-elections. All except one was re-elected – the one change being the election of Séamus Mallon as MP for the Newry and Mourne constituency. Although different in many ways from Hume, Mallon was over the years to become one of his greatest supports as Deputy leader of the SDLP.

As the Troubles entered their third decade and an air of pessimism engulfed these islands, Hume began what turned out to be a lengthy series of talks with Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, his stated wish being to persuade Sinn Féin/IRA to end the violence and at some future date enter peace talks. It would be difficult if not impossible for people under fifty today to understand how seismic an approach this was. It was an enormous risk for Hume, and he was subject to criticism from many quarters, especially as the period when the talks were taking place saw some appalling terrorist atrocities. But following on from the negotiation of the Framework Document by then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and Prime Minister John Major, a ceasefire was declared for 31 August 1994. Hume was vindicated, although his party paid a heavy electoral price as in the years to come Sinn Féin overtook the SDLP as the main Nationalist Party in the North.

The ceasefire was broken by the IRA bombings of Canary Wharf in London but reinstated in July 1997. The following year, the Good Friday agreement was signed amid scenes of unbridled joy, and it was endorsed in referenda North and South. The peace is imperfect; the Executive in Stormont has only recently been reinstated after a two year lapse, but there is no likelihood of a return to the violence that was ever-present for nearly three decades.

John Hume was often criticised even by his colleagues for what became his “single transferable speech” but over the decades and at great personal cost to his health he persisted. He managed to persuade American politicians to use their leverage to get British governments to look for solutions that the minority could support and he persuaded Sinn Féin/IRA to go down the path of peace. Late in the book, the author quotes BBC journalist Denis Murray describing a meeting on European funding where both Paisley and Hume spoke.

When Paisley came to speak, it took me a minute or two to grasp what I was hearing. After a few preliminaries he started to talk about this “piece of earth” and “our divided people” and how we had to “share our future” – it was like listening to what even John called Hume’s single transferable speech…. I couldn’t believe it. I had seen this man turn a peaceful crowd into a rampaging mob…. I was convinced from that moment, and I remain convinced, that whether it was Hume alone or his general European experience, Paisley became convinced there were peaceful and compromising ways forward.

There is a lot more in this very well written book – the enormous role that Pat Hume played behind the scenes; the disgraceful way in which the Hume family were treated by Republicans and Loyalists in Derry, even to the extent that the IRA decided to kidnap his daughter Áine as she left school, only to realise they had kidnapped the wrong girl; the stressful life that led to health problems; the fact that despite finding great rapport with all sorts of people he had no time for Martin McGuinness – perhaps because with the latter’s prestige in Derry he could have stopped the attacks on the Hume household and finally John’s retirement years and the dementia which meant that that great mind was now no longer functioning as before. It also goes into some detail about one of Hume’s weaknesses as a leader – party organisation. This played a part in the decline of the SDLP and its eclipse by Sinn Féin.

One cannot, however come away from the book without a tremendous admiration for a man who did so much to alter the course of Irish history, but who did it in a selfless way. In contrast to many modern politicians who talk the talk (some with more bombast than others), John Hume walked the walk unselfishly for decades and is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Martin Luther King Jnr Nonviolent Peace Prize and the Gandhi Peace Prize. With elections on the horizon in Great Britain and in both parts of  Ireland this book is one that should be read widely by voters, especially younger ones who may be unfamiliar with what this country went through in the latter part of the twentieth century and how one man above all others helped bring things forward and give us a peace we could not have imagined back in the 1970s or 1980s.