John Hume's Legacy

Abstract

John Hume’s Legacy Michael Lillis It would be difficult to argue against the proposition that John Hume has been the most important and influential political leader in Ireland over the past forty years. He has had more influence than anyone else on every taoiseach from Jack Lynch to Bertie Ahern and on every leader of the opposition in the Dáil. He has devised an entire political vocabulary and a multi-layered vision for Northern Ireland that have been adopted in every serious attempt at a settlement, not alone by the SDLP but by every other protagonist from the successive Irish and British governments to unionists of all brands, even to loyalists and Sinn Féin, and of course across the debate in the South. His has become the language for dealing with Northern Ireland throughout the political spectrum in the US, in the EU and in journalism and academic discourse. His extraordinary creativity and moral force have been endlessly acknowledged, for example through the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him and David Trimble, the Gandhi Prize and (his personal favourite) the Martin Luther King Prize. In 2010 he was elected ‘Ireland’s Greatest’in an RTÉ poll of its viewers seeking to identify the greatest Irish person in history. In his final years, John Hume was occluded by illness from politics, the price he and his wife Pat paid for their personal sacrifices for peace and for John’s literally unwearying political and intellectual toil under the unrelenting pressure of the horrors and setbacks of a generation at the very heart of the crisis of Northern Ireland of thirty years. A sense of the scale of his achievements may be captured by a simple recital of some of the political transformations of which he was the principal inspiration and driving force. Among these are the reinvention and repositioning of nationalist politics in the late 1960s, from the jaded antipartitionist slogans of the traditional Nationalist Party of Northern Ireland to the total engagement with the civil rights campaign and an unyielding policy of non-violence, of power-sharing with unionism and the Irish dimension which began with a few articles he wrote in the The Irish Times in 1964. While he endlessly created new tactics and scenarios for progress, he never departed from that analysis or from those principles. Studies • volume 109 • number 436 371 There was also his trenchant confrontation of the British and Stormont governments’ Pavlovian policies of oppression, internment without trial and the abuse of hundreds of innocent men at the beginning of the 1970s, and the cold-blooded massacre of Bloody Sunday. The IRA’s incipient campaign of violence was galvanised by these disastrous security projects and it continued to destroy the hopes of many hundreds of thousands of people for an ordinary life for themselves and for their children throughout the following cycles. The crisis of 1972 forced the suspension of Stormont and facilitated the direct inspiration by Hume of all that was positive in the new thinking behind secretary of state William Whitelaw’s White Paper of March 1973, itself for the most part an anthology of what later became known as Humespeak: power-sharing within Northern Ireland, North-South partnership,Anglo-Irish partnership, a Bill of Rights. The White Paper led in turn to the creation of the short-lived power-sharing Sunningdale government, of which Hume was the most dynamic member, and to the eventually aborted negotiation of the North-South Council of Ireland. Despite the reverses, this was nevertheless a moment of almost dizzy hope, as eloquently recalled by Ian Doherty in his recent review of Noel Dorr’s excellent book Sunningdale: The Search for Peace in Northern Ireland.1 The reviewer equally recalled the disaster of a few months later: ‘I was twenty-one years old at the time and can still remember the feeling of devastation and despair’. Inexcusably, all the hope of that time was betrayed by the surrender by the British government of Harold Wilson and Merlyn Rees in endorsing the British army’s cowardly refusal to confront the loyalist workers’ strike of May 1974 and, equally, by the ‘slow learners’, as Seamus Mallon called them...