and disenfranchisement felt by the Catholic population who lived in Northern Ireland. Equally, though, Hume expressed the inadequacy of the response of the Nationalist Party to these dilemmas. In the minds of young people in the Catholic minority, he wrote, there was a ‘struggle for priority’ between the realities of social problems – unavailability of housing, unemployment, the push to emigration – and the hackneyed slogans championing a United Ireland.
Hume was anxious to highlight the faults of Nationalism in Northern Ireland for holding up the ideals of a United Ireland as a panacea to cure profound underlying problems, which would endure irrespective of any alteration to the constitutional arrangements. The magical thinking of Nationalism was, he argued, an excuse for having failed to deliver any real political gains to its electorate:
In forty years of opposition [the Nationalist Party] have not produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economics plane to the development of Northern Ireland which is, after all, a substantial part of the United Ireland for which they strive. Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans … It is this lack of positive contribution and the apparent lack of interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe that the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and immature and therefore unfit to rule.1
Having stated the negative perception of the Northern Catholic, Hume then proposed a new approach which would enable an exit from the futile bind that the Nationalist Party represented:
The position should be immediately clarified by an acceptance of the Constitutional position. There is nothing inconsistent with such acceptance and a belief that a thirty-two county republic is best for Ireland. Such a change would remove what has been a great stumbling block to the development of normal politics in the North. Catholics could then throw themselves fully into the solution of Northern problems without fear of recrimination.
Hume acknowledged the blatant discrimination in the North, but also called for the minority to address the apparatus of exclusion in the State through constructive politics, modernisation from within rather than boycott. Accepting this premise, Hume suggested that the initiative lay with the ‘Northern Catholic’ to create a politics of change by evolution:
The necessity for a fully organised democratic party which can freely attract and draw upon the talents of the nationally-minded community is obvious. It is to be hoped that the new Nationalist Political Front will create such an organisation so that we shall never in future be embarrassed by one of our political representatives declaring on television that he was not an encyclopedia when asked to produce figures to substantiate his charges of discrimination.
Finally, throwing down the gauntlet to would-be political activists, Hume asserted the centrality of an inclusive economic programme to transcend the division: ‘Community activity, in which all sections play their part can do nothing but create mutual respect and, above all, build the country with our own hands.’2 Read more than a half century after their publication, Hume’s articles were extraordinarily prescient. In his insistence that the mode of change needed to be gradualist, participatory and inclusive; in his identifying the endgame for the divided people in Northern Ireland, Hume identified the Northern problem correctly. Even before the eruption of the Troubles, Hume was a diagnostician of the core principles required to heal the society’s ills.
Since the remit of the articles is an examination of the ‘Northern Catholic’, there is perhaps a disproportionate emphasis on the Catholic role as an agent of change in the political landscape of Northern Ireland. It is important to remember that other political reforms intrinsic to the Protestant community were also necessary. As Seamus Deane has written: ‘As soon as sectarianism is seen to be the basis upon which many Protestants accept unnecessary poverty (and thereby uphold the grotesquely large property holdings of this small group of [wealthy Unionist] families) then the feudal basis of Unionism will have vanished.’3 Even if the articles appear to ask a lot of the minority and not enough of the majority, they are outstanding in identifying the essential elements required of the minority to achieve an equitable settlement in the North. Remembering that the embrace of violent methods to advance political aims was at that time dormant in Northern politics, Hume’s constructive vision was a necessary antidote.
The softness of tone in Hume’s articles hardly matched the desperate circumstances in which Northern Catholics found themselves, nor did it match the fervid tone which John Hume would later, as a practising politician, often take in criticising the intransigence of Unionism and the British government which validated it. In protests such as the one to establish the second university of Northern Ireland in Derry, the ‘University for Derry’ campaign, fought throughout the 1960s, the doctrinaire indifference to the minority’s plea for justice hardened Hume’s stance. By the time he became an elected representative of the Foyle constituency in February 1969, Hume was firmly of the view that well-intentioned cross community cooperation alone would not move the Unionist government to concede basic civil rights demands.
The Early Years
John Hume was born in Derry in 1937 and was the beneficiary of radical educational reform (the 1947 Education Act) which enabled children from working-class backgrounds to access free education. Hume’s secondary education took place in St Columb’s College in Derry and he attended university at Maynooth where he specialised in French and History. He was, as his wife Pat Hume recounts, ‘the eldest of seven children, born in very poor circumstances in the gerrymandered city. So he was very conscious of politics, not the tribal politics but practical politics’.4 Practical politics for Hume took the form of a variety of jobs, roles and initiatives when he was in his twenties: he was a key member of the Irish League of Credit Unions and became its president at the age of 27; he taught full-time at St Columb’s College in Derry; he was a member of the Housing Association of Derry; he was a leader of the University for Derry campaign. Pat Hume remembers that he was ‘always very conscious of restoring dignity to the Catholic people of the North’.
James Sharkey, a teaching colleague at St Columb’s and later Irish ambassador, recalls that Hume was deeply rooted in history, which also informed his political views: ‘I used to drop in at the back of his modern history class. It was clear that the great constitutionalists – Grattan, O’Connell and Parnell – for Hume were not simply admirable historical figures, but they were also exemplars on whom you could base political judgements and political approaches.’ Through Hume’s reading of the ways in which Irish constitutional leaders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had used the political process to advance their aims, he arrived at a firm conclusion about his own tactical approach: to move away from the traditional Northern Nationalists’ self-definition as Anti-Partitionists. As Phil Coulter, a school friend of Hume’s, observed, ‘any party defining itself under an anti-anything rubric, does not speak volumes about what are they for’.
Thus, one of the things that Hume managed to do from the very beginning of his public life in the sixties was to work from within the political structure of Northern Ireland to benefit the Catholic minority, deploying the logic that if there is a one-man, one-vote system in England, then why not the same in the Northern Irish State? What rankled the Nationalist minority in the North of Ireland more than the fact that they lived in a State into which they had been corralled without their democratic consent, was the way in which the administration of that State had from the point of its foundation systematically excluded them from participation and stymied their prosperity. As former Irish Ambassador Sean O’hUiginn has noted:
Hume is a conservative in an Edmund Burke sense, in that he has a keen sense that a community that rejects the framework in which they operate, that they do not have any sense of identity with institutions governing them, is an unstable community. When you, as it were, superimposed the red lines of the different forces that play in Northern Ireland, you got quite a small area where a compromise might be found. Hume focused on that with great persistence.
After the publication of the Irish Times articles, Hume was encouraged by some friends and supporters to run for election, but he declined. He instead acted as election agent for Claude Wilton (‘Vote for Claude the Catholic Prod’) in 1965, while Hume retained his job as a teacher. However, the latter part of the 1960s was a period of a rapidly rising political temperature in Derry, with