The nationalist politician John Hume will be justly remembered as the most essential Irish political figure of his era. Hume, who died Aug. 3 at age 83, lived a life dedicated to peace, social justice, the unity of the Irish nation, and constitutional politics. What makes those commitments impressive is that he kept them at a place and time, Northern Ireland between the 1960s and the turn of the century, in which such commitments were so often blown apart in acts of arson, paramilitary violence, bombing, and terror. The peace he helped to build and broker stood on what he called “principled compromise, not compromised principles.”
Born in Derry in 1937, John Hume’s parents experienced the partition of Ireland into the Republic and Northern Ireland. They lived through the sectarian riots that rocked Northern Ireland in the years before their first son’s birth. And they did so in one of the most gerrymandered cities in what was left of the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland. Seventy percent of Derry’s population, almost all Catholic, were grouped into one ward represented by eight elected city councilors. The other two wards were divided by the Protestant minority of the city, who elected 12 among them.
Hume dedicated himself to the broad social-democratic political tradition in Europe during the Cold War. In Northern Ireland, that impelled him to found a credit union to drive investment to poor communities and to join the burgeoning civil rights movement. The demands of that movement were similar to the American one that inspired it: One man, one vote —and equal treatment under the law and in employment.
Hume became a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which combined standard European democratic-socialist politics with a revived Irish tradition of constitutional nationalism, pursuing Irish unity and separation from the United Kingdom through normal electoral politics and organizing. Although his party eventually withdrew from the devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland in Stormont, seeking its reform, it kept sending elected officials to the mother Parliament in Westminster, where it publicized conditions in Northern Ireland.
As a member of that party, Hume was instrumental in drawing up the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973, which was scuttled by unionist opposition in 1974. Sunningdale envisioned a governing body defined by power-sharing between the Catholic Irish nationalist community and the Protestant Unionists. It tied the national governments in London and Dublin to Northern Ireland as consultative powers. That was John Hume’s vision for Northern Ireland as it descended into madness. Similar arrangements were eventually brokered by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which is why that historic peace accord was sometimes derisively called “Sunningdale for Slow Learners.”
It was in that nearly quarter century between 1973 and 1998 that Northern Ireland turned into a hell on Earth, and in which John Hume stuck to his principles. He continued to work democratically to secure rights and resources for his people, but he also began to search for peace in Northern Ireland beyond Northern Ireland. He won allies in the European Union in Brussels. He made appeals to the Irish American community through Sen. Daniel Moynihan and others, diverting Irish American attention and money away from the Provisional IRA and toward investment and peace in Northern Ireland.
He had long endured the wrath of militant Irish nationalists, but in his bid for peace in the 1990s, he earned it from unionists as well by reaching out to the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein, and its leaders, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. The Good Friday Agreement won Hume the Nobel Prize. But it had costs: The decline of mainstream parties in Northern Ireland and the rise of the political militants. Sinn Fein is on its way to becoming the biggest party in Ireland, North and South. Hume’s SDLP is on life support.
In the years before his death, the power-sharing arrangements of Northern Ireland seemed to break down even if the peace has held. But Hume’s vision is hardly exhausted in the reformed Northern Ireland Assembly or even in the Good Friday Agreement. He believed that even these structures would one day give way to others. His nationalism was not just about bringing the territory of Ireland under one government but bringing its people together as one nation. A merely united Ireland could be a war zone again. An agreed Ireland would be at peace.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online and the author of the memoir My Father Left Me Ireland.
