Peace by ordeal

Paul Routledge, John Hume: A Biography, HarperCollins, £8.99, 311 pages

From its beginnings, as the cumbersome name implies, the Social Democratic and Labour Party was a hybrid, forcibly amalgamating different strands in the political life of Northern Ireland Catholics.  The SDLP was ‘The John Hume and Gerry Fitt Party’ – in that order.

Timely though outdated, this new paperback edition of Paul Routledge’s biography of John Hume, takes its hero’s story to the start of 1997.  A lot has happened since: the election of Blair, the talks, the Good Friday Agreement, the Nobel Prize.

So the book is really most interesting as background.  Routledge cites several interviews with Hume among his sources, quoting at length from his speeches and statements over the past thirty-plus years.  This gives a vivid cumulative impression of the man: the rumpled figure, husky insistent voice.

Born sixty-one years ago to a working class Bogside family, John Hume benefited from a state-funded grammar school education.  He crossed the border and studied for the priesthood for three years at Maynooth.  If he formed any general critique here at the heart of authoritarian pre-Vatican II Irish Catholicism he kept it to himself, merely deciding the life was “not for him” and leaving to get married.

Unexpectedly we learn that Hume’s father’s family were Scottish Presbyterians, that John Hume himself “became an accomplished cricketer” and fluent French-speaker at school.  As teacher, businessman and later as energetic Minister of Commerce in the short-lived Executive, Hume stood out.

Despite the usual crop of inaccuracies, the book helps clarify the overall context. The story of Labour failure in Ulster: the split between the Northern Ireland Labour Party and Republican Labour, the civil rights movement and the emergence of two parallel parties, the SDLP and Sinn Fein.  The similarities stand out now.  Both multi-issue parties with strong grass-roots organisations, replacing the empty rhetoric of their predecessors.

A chain-smoker with “no outside interests”, John Hume was from the beginning the driving-force in the SDLP.  Gerry Adams, like Hume, though unlike many other Republicans, was involved in the civil rights movement; he succeeded Gerry Fitt as MP for West Belfast and has recently explicitly described Sinn Fein as “the Irish Republican Labour Party”.

Hume’s home-base is Derry, on the western border of Northern Ireland, overwhelmingly Catholic, a city of sixty thousand (depending on where you draw the line).  “A genuine Irish city”, as Routledge puts it; ninety miles away from the huge sprawl of Belfast with its 400,000 inhabitants.  The battle against Protestant/Unionist ascendancy was long ago won in Derry and it would have been interesting to know how much of a role Hume had in the power-sharing deal within his native city.  

More follows

Hume review [R. Howe]

Routledge is unflattering about Hume’s role in the power-sharing Executive which ruled Northern Ireland for five months in 1974. Hume’s arrogance - or his very skills as debater and negotiator helped to wreck the Sunningdale agreement.  He insisted on a powerful cross-border Council of Ireland as well as the Executive itself, then his remark in the printed text of a speech that the Council was the vehicle that would “trundle” the North into union with the Republic, could hardly have been more calculated to enrage Protestant opinion.so much of his life has been given over to tenaciously fighting his way back to the point where this experiment (“A hand-me-down puppet government”, as Adams described it.) broke off. 

Northern Ireland was a Tory fiefdom in the mid-Sixties, like the House of Lords only colder.  The aristocrats and fox-hunters are departed now, replaced by paramilitary figures who regard politics as a soccer game played with human heads.

Hume has not been without his detractors.  His party denounced as “the Stoop Down Low Party” by the Provos; “Six Dirty Lousy Pigs” to the Unionists. Republicans regarded Hume with good-natured contempt: a blusterer, a plaster-saint, a media-creation owing his prominence to the lads.  The pro-IRA Phoenix magazine in Dublin

last year speculated on the SDLP leader’s accession to the Irish presidency, eagerly weighing Adams’ chances of inheriting Hume’s seat in the Euro-parliament, while Mitchel McLaughlin would take his seat at Westminster.  Hume was sure of his reward, the anonymous writer concluded jeeringly, “in heaven”.

At present it seems that persistence has paid off.  The claim to have achieved ‘an agreed Ireland’ seems too sanguine.  The Unionists remain deeply divided; Sinn Fein’s tactic appears to be to use the disarmament issue to destabilise David Trimble.  This no doubt appeals to their sense of humour, though it is hardly a display of goodwill.

Was Hume really a Labour man at heart at all?   “The programme of the Labour Party is too Socialist, even today,” he told Die Welt in 1970.  “If Ted Heath had been Prime Minister when Sunningdale had been challenged, I believe the Agreement would still have been there,” he told Paul Routledge.

The most important right in Irish politics is the right to petition.  Which is why Stormont with its implied motto DON’T EVEN BOTHER ASKING  was such a standing provocation.

Hume has been adept at seeking the intercession of politicians in London and Dublin and further afield.  In British Labour he maintained particularly strong links with Stan Orme and Kevin McNamara.  He first met Senator Ted Kennedy back in 1972; the connection bearing fruit twenty years later when Bill Clinton became President and launched the American peace initiative in Northern Ireland, much to the fury of the Conservatives.

He has been at home in the bogus surroundings of the Euro-parliament

16 November 1998