Film footage exists of Hume lecturing Derry teenagers to ‘have a bit of sense’ rather than to fight back physically against the Unionist government’s security forces. Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) colleague, Denis Haughey, remembers that the importance of that stance was to ‘preserve the integrity’ of the moral case that a rights-based reform programme sought. Another of Hume’s colleagues, Seamus Mallon, elaborates:
Hume had the vision to see that violence wasn’t going to solve the problem, that the British Government was never going to really tackle the problem, that the Irish Government had just wakened up to the fact that there was a Northern Ireland. The Civil Rights Movement in America inspired John. It started with this very simple phrase: ‘things can be done, if we do them the right way’.
Mallon remembers a defining moment of the type that led both he and Hume to fully embrace politics:
One day somebody who I had gone to school with came to me. He lived in a hovel and had no running water, no toilet facilities. He said, ‘Seamus, I went to George Woods [the local Unionist councillor] and I asked for a house. He told me “no Catholic pig or his litter would get a house in Markethill” as long as he was there’. I could not get that out of my mind.
Mallon, like Hume and many others, was a beneficiary of the 1947 Education Act and had obtained a university degree. As a teacher he was, like Hume, economically comfortable. He also had, like Hume, a strong sense of responsibility for those of his own community who did not have the education to adequately defend themselves against such institutional prejudice and contempt. Mallon elaborates:
The Civil Rights Movement was beginning to expand and I knew it was the way to go. I could not have walked away from it without trying to do something. There was a man selected to become a councillor in the first council election: I got home from school, and my wife said to me, ‘that guy has pulled out’. Between four o’clock and five I had to get a candidate. There came a crucial point where I had to accept that I was not going to get one. Were we going to give this seat to the Unionists and let them do what they were doing? Going into politics was no decision of mine.
The Unionist Reaction
The intensity of the depravations suffered by the Northern minority had crystallised in the Civil Rights Movement’s protests. However, rather than having the emancipatory effect of bringing both sides closer together to create an equitable political structure, the movement exposed demons within Unionism and the bias of the British parliament which supported it. This combination eventually fuelled the rationale for an alternative response to the injustice of Northern Ireland, the armed guerrilla struggle launched by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the following, James Sharkey gives a comprehensive sweep of the declension of Unionist responses to the changes demanded in Northern Ireland in 1968–72:
Equality for all was the determining motif of the civil rights campaign. Unionism could not accommodate this demand; it imploded, it factionalised, it fragmented. Unionists eventually found solidarity in a sort of sectarian intransigence and they operated with very severe policing. They saw IRA conspiracies everywhere at a time when the IRA barely existed in Northern Ireland. Through their inflexibility, their heavy-handedness, their discrimination, they provoked the revival and recruitment of the IRA, the force in history which they hated and feared most. The two of them became locked in a sort of lethal, cadaverous embrace and that set the scene for the early 1970’s: spirals of violence and counter-violence, the British got drawn into it in a one-sided way. And it fell to people like Hume and other leaders to point the way forward, to look for political structures that could accommodate all these different tensions, including a role for the Irish government – and that was broadly the message that Hume carried to the United States.
The reaction within Unionism to reasonable demands on the part of the minority in Northern Ireland was extreme: the security forces of the State countered non-violent protest with violence; Unionism also spawned the illegal UVF in 1966 and later popular movements such as Vanguard, which had David Trimble as its legal advisor and whose leader, Bill Craig, said in a famous speech in Belfast’s Ormeau Park: ‘we’ll liquidate the enemy’. Was such language, and the position he was taking, unsettling to adherents of the movement? David Trimble recalls: ‘Bill was using that language in the hope that it would make London stop and think. Unfortunately, they didn’t.’ Even so, as a matter of principle or morality, and recalling twentieth- century history, was the language ‘to liquidate the enemy’ not disturbing? ‘No, look, I don’t think one should pay too much attention to those words and what was said,’ recalls David Trimble. ‘The substance of the matter was that at the time, governments were driving towards what became the Sunningdale Agreement [in 1973]. The Sunningdale Agreement was a mistake.’
Hume was representative of a generation of young Catholic graduates who used politics and the legal apparatus to take cases and adopt a civilised approach to resolving this – is that fair to say? David Trimble: ‘I don’t find it particularly helpful to be going back over that. If we take the issue of housing, it was suggested that local councils were discriminatory in housing and that is acknowledged. You can point to the fact that there was some inventive boundary drawing.’ Trimble acknowledged that the Unionist point of view ‘would have regarded the Civil Rights Movement as being unnecessary and as being something that opened the door to violence. In the early days, the Unionist man in the street, I’m afraid, would have lumped all the Catholic political leadership together as being the people who effectively created the violence. Not a particularly fair judgement but that was the general view’.
Trimble’s reflection, that Unionism viewed the Civil Rights Movement as unnecessary, is correct in the sense that it was unnecessary for the perpetuation of the Unionist monolith. His second point, that it opened the door to violence, was given amplification in the South by writer and former Irish Labour Party politician, Conor Cruise O’Brien: ‘Would the removal of the disabilities of Catholics in the Northern Ireland electorate be worth taking at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pograms, murders?’8 The argument propounded by Conor Cruise O’Brien was that a Civil Rights Movement could easily beget a violent movement and that such a movement could be hijacked. How can such risks be weighed against the injustices that the Civil Rights Movement sought to remedy? Austin Currie, John Hume’s close political colleague and co-founder of the SDLP, recalls: ‘It was John Hume who said that when you throw a rock into a lake it will cause ripples but you [weren’t] quite sure where the ripples would continue. You do something that you see as being an objective which will be successful and useful and there can be other consequences. It’s always the danger to any agitation.’
As David Trimble has indicated, there were a variety of Unionist perspectives about this new rights-demanding movement. The more hardline people were in denial that the rights demanded were ever withheld. There was also a perception that the Civil Rights Movement was merely a vehicle for the IRA to generate enough chaos to gather itself into an armed struggle for a United Ireland. It was never going to be ecumenical, even though it might have started with that ideal. As Irish political and constitutional expert, Brendan O’Leary, says: ‘The truth is that the Civil Rights Movement was a coalition. It contained communists, it contained socialists, it contained Republicans disillusioned with previous IRA and Sinn Féin activity. It included Northern Nationalists unhappy with the Nationalist Party.’
It also contained Protestants, particularly those who had been to Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s and who were willing to discuss options for building a new society together. There was a pervasive view that when people from a Unionist background made any form of coalition with those from a Nationalist background it was tantamount to ceding political ground. When Ivan Cooper, for example, a liberal from a Church of Ireland background, became a civil rights activist and formed a political alliance with John Hume, friends and neighbours from his village, Killaloo in County Derry, were openly contemptuous of his ‘betrayal’. Even among younger and educated Unionists, there came to be a clash between conscience and tribal instincts; typically, the latter won out. Brendan O’Leary relates: ‘We know from the archives that the O’Neill cabinet, right up to 1968, knows that it’s wrong not to have universal suffrage in local government but it’s obsessed by the fact that if they apply universal local government suffrage, Nationalists are going to gain twice as many votes as