become prominently active in public affairs.
The first augury of the Civil Rights Movement was the University for Derry protest in February 1965, which was remarkable in that it represented the entire community of Derry. Hume fronted this cross-community rally and motorcade to Stormont Parliament in February 1965 to establish the ‘second university’ in Derry, the ‘second city’ of the Northern Irish State. This 25,000-strong motorcade was one of the earliest and strongest expressions of non-violent protest in Northern Ireland, and was comparable in intent and conviction to the Selma to Montgomery march, led by Martin Luther King the following month, March 1965.
The campaign to establish a university in Derry failed when, on the basis of the Lockwood Report (1965), the second university was established in Coleraine, a predominately Protestant market town, rather than in largely Catholic Derry City. This decision was entirely in line with other bigoted policies emanating from Stormont: the Benson Report (1963) cut rail infrastructure to the western part of the North dramatically; the Matthew Report (1963) situated Northern Ireland’s ‘new city’ at Craigavon and consequently the infrastructure in the North orientated still more on the eastern and predominantly Protestant part of the State. Moreover, economic woes attended these political injustices: the shipping line between Derry and Glasgow was closed and the Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) factory, which had employed 1,700 people, closed in 1967. Poverty in Derry City had noticeably worsened just as the political grievances accumulated.
Above all, the rigged system of allocating houses embittered the predominately Nationalist electoral ward of Derry. As journalist and activist Eamonn McCann observed: ‘We had thousands of people on a housing list and everybody in Derry knew that one of the reasons that more houses were not being built was that … to give a person a house was to give them a vote: only householders could vote and the Unionist Party in Derry had to be very circumspect about to whom it handed a vote.’ Unsurprisingly, then, it was more than anything else the housing situation that made it inevitable for John Hume to enter parliamentary politics. The property qualification for franchise in Derry meant that unequal housing allocation (in addition to being a source of misery in itself) produced a concomitant political injustice – it deprived Catholics of the vote. Having been corralled into confined and overcrowded areas, like the working-class Bogside, their surroundings continually reminded them of the inequality of the State. A visitor to Derry at the time, who viewed the Bogside from the higher grounds of St Columb’s College, commented on the rising chimney smoke of the area and remarked on ‘the smouldering fires of Derry’.5
In 1968, Paddy ‘Bogside’ Doherty, an influential community activist, asked Hume to consider running for election. Hume judged, based on the five years of activism leading up to the 1969 election, that to effect decisive political change required becoming an elected representative. It was both the next logical and necessary step: community activism, documentary film-making, publishing journalistic articles, becoming the President of the Irish Credit Union and taking business initiatives was still not enough.
The Catholic minority, and Hume too, had lost patience with the putatively reformist Terence O’Neill (Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, 1963–9). O’Neill’s persona, in stark contrast to his predecessors, was relatively ecumenical and open to interaction with Catholics. He exuded a fresh, well-meaning approach to including the Catholic minority in the affairs of Northern Ireland, to make them stakeholders. Yet, as a reformist he was ineffective. In his Autobiography, O’Neill expressed disappointment that the Catholics of Northern Ireland did not support him enough to pass ‘liberalising’ legislation.
His disappointment was naïve. Despite his well-meaning rhetoric, O’Neill’s tenure as Prime Minister was characterised by retrograde steps to marginalise and to alienate the minority, which even the more reasonable strands of the Catholic minority perceived as a provocation. O’Neill faced decisive opposition to his tentative reform from the ranks of his own Unionist Party (which ultimately conspired to remove him from office) and he was unable to carry his reform measures. Hume was later to say:
I cannot forget that the administration which is about to go out of office is the administration which created Craigavon [the Matthew Report] as a second city, instead of Derry. I cannot forget that it produced development plans for Ballymena, Bangor, Antrim, Larne, et cetera, before one was forced out of it for Derry. I cannot forget that it is the administration of Benson and the closure of the railways … it was also the administration of Lockwood and the creation of the second university in a market town … No economic risks were taken to develop the Indian territory that lies on the other side of the Sperrins. What we have received we have received because it has been forced.6
Having been cut off from its natural hinterland of Donegal/Inishowen by partition, Hume believed that only cross border cooperation consolidated by governmental support would help to develop the North-West. Yet, given how Stormont was constituted, such cooperation was very remote. Remembering Frederick Douglass’s dictum that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand’, the move towards politics on the part of Hume was animated by a profound sense of alienation from the political structures that existed. The ‘awakening of conscience’ (as Hume had called the University for Derry campaign) was not followed by the requisite recognition of the Catholic minority, especially in the western part of the State, nor any acknowledgement that it was being deliberately immiserated by its government.
A fundamental aspect of Hume’s political life was to reimagine a politics capable of transcending ancient historical constraints and to envisage Ireland benefiting from wider international partnerships; his will to seek and ability to find support for his reconciliation agenda in broader spheres – Europe and America. In the case of the latter, when he went to America and read, on the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, E pluribus unum ‘Out of many, we are one’, he believed that Northern Ireland’s divided people also had much to learn from such a cultivation of diversity. As his wife Pat explained: ‘He felt that here were people who had had to leave the place of their birth because of conflict, because of intolerance and they went to the United States and they were able to come together under the one constitution. He felt that this was the model, why can we not get over our differences?’ Eamonn McCann elaborates:
John saw things, unlike the old Nationalist Party, in a European context. Even before he became a Member of the European Parliament he would talk about the resolution of conflicts within Europe after World War Two. He also was very acutely aware of the American dimension, right from the very beginning and, from the beginning, he was relating to US power. It did not make sense to him to talk in Harlem to Black Panthers. He wanted to talk to the White House.
A more extensive analysis of the wider circles of Hume’s influences will come in subsequent chapters. However, before Hume formally entered parliamentary politics, he became engaged in the most dramatic and far-reaching shift in the political landscape of Northern Ireland since its foundation: the Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Movement
One of the defining moments of modern Irish history was the first civil rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968: due both to the march itself and the RUC violence that repelled it. The civil rights campaign was a radical new direction in a society that very badly needed it. From the first it was an inclusive movement, open to everyone who wished to establish civil rights in Northern Ireland. Even so, the difficulties of creating a broad-based political movement in a society where politics had resolutely broken down on sectarian lines persisted. As James Sharkey, who was there, recalls:
On the fifth of October I remember having a debate with someone and I said, ‘I wonder how many unionists, how many working class Protestants are here today?’ I felt that maybe things were just a little bit too early, because if you got off on the wrong foot you could be seen as sectarian. The great success of John Hume, I would argue, has been his persistent focus on the concept of reconciliation.7
Whatever is said about its necessity, inevitability or desirability, the efficacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland is undeniable: it gained many of its core demands almost immediately on the basis that it remained non-violent and determined. Even in his earliest awakening as a civil rights campaigner in the streets of Derry, it was always clear that it simply did not occur to Hume to resort to throwing stones at the police. Much as that