John Hume in America. Maurice Fitzpatrick

commitment. Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, intimated that Wilson was even considering a full British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, including the cutting off of the financial subvention which effectively sustained Northern Ireland, in the hope that that would encourage Unionists to be more conciliatory with Dublin. However, John Hume believed that the Sunningdale provisions – all parties working together across the divide, cross-border political and economic cooperation, including the British and Irish governments – had great validity. Gerry Adams disagreed:

      I see a validity. But I see the Sunningdale Agreement as a bad deal. It was not a good deal. It did not get to the root of the problems. We did not get to the root until we got round to the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. Whether it was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, whether it was Sunningdale or the Downing Street Declaration; all of them improved as things went on.

      When the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, Seamus Mallon, ever ready with a stinging formulation, stated that it was ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. How so?

      The Good Friday Agreement in my view (and I was one of the people very much involved in creating it) was not as good a deal [for Nationalists] in many ways as the Sunningdale Agreement, which had much stronger North-South structures. The irony of it all is that those who claimed to be defending the Nationalist community in the North of Ireland in 1974 – the IRA and Sinn Féin – were the very same people who bombed the Sunningdale Agreement out of existence.

      That campaign, in combination with the withdrawal of support by some Unionists and the British government’s failure to stand up to the striking Loyalist organisations, preventing travel and the delivery of food and other basic services, spelled the end of the Executive. In Seamus Mallon’s opinion:

      They buckled. It is the most you can say about it. That opportunity, had it been taken, would have saved many lives. The tragedy was Unionism did not see the opportunity for a revitalisation within their community; Sinn Féin–IRA made the destruction of Sunningdale their priority. How contradictory can you get? The Good Friday Agreement is Sunningdale for slow learners. That is how I described it at the time.

      Seán Donlon corroborates: ‘The subsequent agreements, whether the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, [or] the Good Friday agreement of 1998, are all based on the Sunningdale principles, or the John Hume principles: unite the two communities in Northern Ireland; create North–South structures for cooperation. Essentially what we have today is what was agreed at Sunningdale.’ What effect did the collapse of the Sunningdale Executive – that represented so much of Hume’s thinking – have on him? In Seán Donlon’s opinion: ‘Once the Sunningdale agreement had collapsed, Hume felt that he must now focus on getting support for his position particularly in the United States. So it was after Sunningdale’s collapse that Hume began what I call his American chapter.’

      The demise of power-sharing drove Hume to seek the support of the most powerful government in the world, and to bring its influence to bear on Northern Irish politics. Simply put, Hume’s analysis, post-Sunningdale, was that the two communities could not do it on their own; the British government had failed to stand by power-sharing in Northern Ireland and gave in to its traditional allies, the Unionists. The Irish government had proved unable to dissuade the British government from abandoning the Joint Agreement. It was now clear to Hume that bringing the support of the US to bear would help to balance the equation enough for a return to constitutionality and the establishment of a lasting power-sharing arrangement based on Anglo-Irish consensus.

      Hume’s US strategy

      Building firm and sustained relations on Capitol Hill and, eventually, in the White House was without precedent in Irish-American relations. Senator Ted Kennedy was later to remark:

      It was rather interesting why the leaders of Ireland had not [engaged America meaningfully on policy matters]. De Valera was certainly alive when my brother visited Ireland but there was no real kind of a play towards involving, interesting, and engaging … I don’t think there’s any question that the dramatic shift and change are really attributed to Hume and the confluence of events that took place at this time.16

      In a speech entitled ‘Ireland in the Atlantic Community’, Hume stated: ‘The great tides of Irish emigration began to flow to America in the 19th century … The Irish in America tried without success to interest the Washington administration in the Irish question.’17 Hume fully understood that by focusing on Washington and not on grassroots Irish-American organisations that he was breaking with the precedent of Irish leaders. Partly due to a lack of focus on federal power, but in large part due to vigorous resistance by the British to Irish involvement in political Washington, the Irish in America were contained. As former Irish diplomat Michael Lillis argued: