John Hume: Role Models

I am going to continue with my mini series of role models on this blog with the Irish politician, John Hume. Hume has often been considered as Ireland's Martin Luther King, being a political leader who was confronted with a deeply divided society. He was widely regarded as one of Ireland's most influential and respected figures and a driving force of the peace process in the country. Hume brought a new vision to the country and wanted acceptance within a shared political space. A person whose fight and drive should inspire us within our own life. 

In his early life, he was a native of Derry and founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). He was also a member of the European Parliament and the UK Parliament as well as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Hume was born in 1937 and intended to complete his clerical studies to become a priest, but left before finishing training. Having studied history and French, he returned home where he became a teacher and was a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and was chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965. 

The formation of the Derry Credit Union in the later 1950s was due to the composition of society at the time. The city's poor, largely Catholic communities, were caught in a miserable financial cycle - too poor to buy a home but without a house to use as collateral to secure a bank loan to help them on their way. Hume and five others broke that cycle when they collected their savings - a grand total of £8 and 10 shillings - to form Northern Ireland's first credit union of 1960. This gave local people an attainable source of credit. From this, the Derry Credit Union now has more than 30,000 members and has issued more than a million loans. 

Hume was a figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s in Ireland, with being the cofounder of Derry Citizens' Action Committee to organise non-violent agitation for civil rights. He became an independent nationalist member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1969 at the height of the civil rights campaign. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and served as Minister of Commerce in the short-lived power sharing government in 1974. He joined 4 Westminster MPs in 1971 as part of a 48 hour hunger strike to protest against the introduction of internment without trial of Irish republicans. Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without chargers or intent to file charges. It is used for the confinement of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects. 

In 1979, Hume is elected as an MEP to the European Parliament and in 1983 he is elected to Westminster as MP for Foyle.  As a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, he succeeded Gerry Fitt as its leader in 1979. In 1988, Hume met Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams for the first time to explore the possibility of a ceasefire. These talks are speculated to have led directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, a treaty which gave the Irish government an advisory role in Northern Ireland's government while confirming that there would be no change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland unless a majority of its people agreed to join the Republic. This agreement also set out the conditions for the establishment of a devolved consensus government in the region. 

In 1994, Hume helped persuade the Clinton administration to grant Gerry Adams a US visa, which was a prerequisite in the push for an IRA ceasefire. The dialogue between John Hume and Gerry Adams eventually delivered the 1994 IRA ceasefire which ultimately provided the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement was emerged from. Hume is therefore granted as the thinker behind the many political developments in Northern Ireland, from the Anglo-Irish Agreement to the Belfast Agreement. 

I feel that in the UK we rarely speak of Irish politics and of the key figures which are attributed to achieving unity and peace between the two institutions: Britain and Ireland. Hume was a bridge builder in communities with flag-based identities and community suspicions. He never gave up on his view for peaceful coexistence between the two nations. We can relate his politics to the politics of today where Britain is bitterly divided by Brexit, by class and by cultural values. Flag-based nationalism is rising and it is not only being seen in Scotland. 

John Hume spent a lifetime drawing the island of Ireland together. He argued, fought and achieved an agreed Ireland which was shared peacefully by unionists and nationalists. He enlisted support from successive administrations in Dublin, London, Brussels and Washington. Viewers in a 2020 RTE poll voted Hume the greatest person in Irish history and he received a Noble Peace Prize in October 17th, 1998. On February 2004, he announced his complete retirement from politics and was succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader. 

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, the first Summer University of Democracy of the Council of Europe, and at St Thomas University. 

His funeral which was today is a mark of his legacy within our country. The people of Ireland during the Troubles will understand how hard Hume's task was to unite Ireland in that time period but Hume persisted throughout decades of exhausting activism which went beyond delivering speeches and signing documents. He continuously put his career and life on the line for civil rights and social justices, advocating for causes many considered impossible to achieve. He will be remembered for his commitment to peaceful protest and by showing that politics is something that real, ordinary people can do. 

His funeral was composed of a small number of guests and his family. It included messages from the Dalai Lama who said: "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 all of us to follow." His son, John Hume junior, said: "At this time of planetary fragility, more than ever, he would be urging that we move beyond our flag-based identities, and recognise the need to protect our common home...We all need one another, we all have a role to play, and all our roles are of equal importance."

And that is the message that I end this blog post with and what we should learn from John Hume's life.