of holding the constitutional line became exceptionally difficult after Bloody Sunday. Eamonn McCann further elaborates:
One of the big mistakes made by the State in relation to the early civil rights marches was to attack them. Had they not attacked them, had they just allowed these marches to proceed peacefully and a few people make their speeches and everybody go home ... It was no longer possible after Bloody Sunday for John or anybody else to say what we are looking for are British rights for British citizens. That slogan was gone. That perspective was shot off the streets on Bloody Sunday.
Embarrassed by international outrage and protest, within two months of Bloody Sunday, British Prime Minister Ted Heath summoned Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner to London and peremptorily informed him that he was proroguing the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Without any further discussion, Northern Ireland would be ruled directly from London. The first phase of Northern Irish history (1920–72) was over. The parliament which had symbolised a half century of injustice towards the minority was finished. Its demise represented the failure of any form of self-government in Northern Ireland without substantial oversight from London and Dublin. While the removal of its powers gave the minority occasion for relief, the fall of Stormont also left a political vacuum – 1972 was one of the bloodiest years of the Troubles – with an attendant sense of hopelessness. For Hume, while a solution within Northern Ireland had been unworkable, there was still one more option to work towards and it involved winning support for his strategy from Dublin and London.
2
The American Dimension Unleashed
John Hume had first travelled to the US to represent the Irish League of Credit Unions in the 1960s. Hume brought to the US a fascination for the republican model of government and an admiration for those who challenged the government to live up to the ideal of equality expressed at the founding of the United States. Mayor Ray Flynn of Boston walked John Hume through the city’s streets and recalls that Hume was:
Fascinated with Martin Luther King [who] was a strong presence in Boston since the days when he went to Boston University. I would tell John stories about how I saw Martin Luther King out in the Roxbury neighbourhood marching into downtown Boston. John would want to know the whole background. I would take him to different locations where Martin Luther King lived. I realised that John really looked up to Martin Luther King, probably more so than any political leader or personality in the world.
By the late 60s and the eruption of the Troubles, Hume, by then a prominent politician, was sought out for his views on the unfolding situation by concerned Irish-America. That began a series of false starts before an effective coterie of supporters could form.
As early as the autumn of 1969, when Hume was invited to address the Donegal Men’s Association in Boston, he had a realisation about where his political activities in the US would centre – it was to be at the treetop level rather than at the grassroots. As Seán Donlon, who was Irish Consul General in Boston from 1969–71, remembers:
In those days Ted Kennedy, as far as I recall, had no presence in Boston. He didn’t live there. John began to form the view that organised as it was, Irish-America was not the route to power. Organized Irish-America was extraordinary in the sense that there were maybe 500 different groupings – whether it was the Donegal men, Cork men, the Éire Society of Boston, the Irish Cultural Centre – you had lots and lots of organisations dealing with specific issues, for example, immigration or dealing with social matters. But John quickly came to the view, and he was absolutely right, that these are not the route to power; these people are not into the American political scene. If I want to influence American policy somehow or other, I’m going to have to break into the Washington scene … I think very quickly John began to focus on: Where is the power? Who has the power? How can I enter that zone of power?
Hume found that America was receptive to the Irish Question, but only on preconceived grounds and through the filter of their own experience, and that a good deal of education would be required to elucidate the complexity of the Northern Irish conflict for American audiences. Again, Seán Donlon explains:
The American media could easily relate to what was happening in Northern Ireland, particularly in 1968–69 because it was almost a copy of the Civil Rights Movement in their own country. The complexities were not easily understood in the United States; people understood civil rights, housing, electoral reform, discrimination, all of these things were understood. What was not easily understood was: Where was Northern Ireland? Why was it a part of the United Kingdom? What was the background? Why did people want a United Ireland, and of course in the Irish-American community, why don’t we achieve it by violence? In 1969, even people who subsequently became phenomenal supporters – Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and Hugh Carey – were inclined to look towards what became the Provisional IRA. That was their first instinct.
In time these supporters – Hugh Carey, then in the US Congress and later Governor of New York, Ted Kennedy who was a senator from Massachusetts and Tip O’Neill who was a rising star in the Democratic party – were to join with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator for New York, and form very powerful grouping concerned to support Ireland’s search for peace and justice. Thus, as American politicians became more involved, the need for an effective communicator, who combined a deep understanding of the historical evolution of the political problems in Northern Ireland with a vision of their solution, became even more necessary. Bloody Sunday, and the broader disintegration of the North of Ireland in 1972, focused the attention of Washington on the Irish Question as perhaps never before. The massacre in Derry that day made the need for a touchstone on the Irish Question all the more necessary for US politicians wishing to engage on Irish matters.
Bloody Sunday and its Repercussions
From any point of view, Bloody Sunday was a diplomatic disaster for British policy makers. After the massacre of innocent, non-violent protesters on their own streets, Britain’s moral case to act as an ‘honest broker’ among a divided people instantly proved risible. To exacerbate the sense of injustice in Derry, and to completely extinguish Britain’s integrity, Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who presided over a Tribunal on Bloody Sunday, exculpated the Parachute Regiment – which was guilty of the murders – and instead blamed the marchers. The international community’s sympathy for the Catholic victims of the massacre in Derry was apparent no less in Washington. Senator Ted Kennedy, who had called for a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1971, stated in Congressional Hearings on Northern Ireland: ‘Just as Ulster is Britain’s Vietnam, so Bloody Sunday is Britain’s My Lai.’ Tip O’Neill, by now House Majority Whip, was similarly exercised, if less outspoken in public. As Seán Donlon remembers:
When Bloody Sunday happened there was a huge reaction and enormous criticism of the British military, of the British political system. At that stage, Tip O’Neill got together with some of his colleagues in the House of Representatives and arranged to hold hearings on the Northern Ireland situation; technically, he did that through a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
When Tip O’Neill invited a delegation from Derry to Washington to give evidence Hume declined the invitation, judging that at such a fraught time his focus needed to be squarely on the domestic situation at hand. As a result of those hearings, O’Neill sponsored a petition signed by 102 House members in response to the Northern Irish crisis. At the same time, a perception was growing in the US Congress that Hume would be central to any effort to address the crisis.
The need for a new voice on the Northern Ireland Question, someone who could show a way forward, was also shared by visiting American media reporters, and early on it was recognised that Hume could be that voice. As The New York Times reported in August 1972:
The Social Democratic and Labor party, a disparate grouping of Opposition politicians, sometimes is described as ‘six men and one mind’. The mind belongs to Mr. Hume, who at 35, is generally held to be the deepest thinker and most able tactician in the group. It is not just intellect that accounts for his importance in efforts to break the impasse here. Mr. Hume is also believed to have won, in part through frequent television appearances, more prestige in Dublin than any other politician in Northern Ireland. But his strongest claim to influence is his ability to speak for Derry …