retreat to the comfort of theological justifications.
The political process that Hume and his colleagues from the minority sought to promote was animated more and more by a belief that power-sharing in the divided community was the precondition for any sustainable political change in Northern Ireland. Embracing violence to force their objectives upon others, he argued, ‘may appear at one time or another to achieve short-term objectives, but in society as it exists here violence inevitably leads to polarisation and civil war between Catholic and Protestant … We are going nowhere unless there is a breaking down of the barriers between the religious divide’.19
Getting Organised: The Formation of the SDLP
The Social Democratic and Labour Party was formed in August 1970, and its foundation was a fulfilment of one of Hume’s election campaign pledges the previous year. The SDLP was one of several parties to emerge in the two years following the start of the Troubles. Hume understood the weakness of a fragmented opposition in such a recalcitrant administration as Stormont Parliament. Therefore a central motivation for forming the SDLP was to organise against the Unionist bloc, which went hand-in-hand with another core objective: the establishment of Proportional Representation in Northern Irish elections to replace the first-past-the-post Westminster model of elections, which had been so schismatic in the North and which the SDLP believed would enable fairer representation. Beyond that, the SDLP wanted to establish a Bill of Rights and a Council of Ireland to replace the outmoded (and entirely theoretical) territorial claims to the North in the Irish Constitution of 1937.
The SDLP was determined to break with tribal politics and to plot a third way through the vehicle of social democracy around which, it was hoped, diverse elements of Northern Ireland could rally. In its earliest composition, the SDLP was an umbrella organisation in that it gathered together Belfast Socialists, Derry and Mid-Tyrone Nationalists, and liberal Protestants all under the banner of social democracy. From the outset, it was a party of leaders, of strong personalities and of sharp regional cleavages which led in time to conflicts as well as common cause among its members. As a sitting MP in London, Gerry Fitt had the highest political standing of the founding members and was appointed party leader. While not the party leader until 1979, many people saw Hume as the de facto leader, the person whose capacity for strategic thinking and planning was clearly the best. Ivan Cooper remembers that Hume had a particular talent for forming policy and remembers ‘one occasion that he dictated policy for a period of three hours and that became the SDLP policy’.
Parliament and the Street: Civil Disobedience
Hume married his activities as a leader of street protests with his parliamentary life. It was not atypical that he would attend Stormont throughout a given a week and on Saturday or Sunday participate in street demonstrations. This became a form of double duty whereby one role reinforced the other. Hume combined his considerable skill in stewarding marches with his authority as an MP: men, women and children understood that, with Hume in the lead, a march was much more likely to pass off safely; they knew, too, that the objective of the march was more likely to succeed. The often suggested parallel between Hume and Martin Luther King was particularly apt for the ways in which he channelled the power of street demonstrations into a parliamentary campaign for justice.
Hume’s participation in protest events in Derry City has been captured in iconic photographs which includes images of Hume, Hugh Logue and Ivan Cooper being arrested, put up against the wall, and doused with water cannon. Hugh Logue recalls one such incident:
John went forward – he was the MP for the area and had the authority – and spoke to the officer in charge of the operation and said: ‘If you guys move back and withdraw, I’ll get the people to go home and there won’t be any more trouble’. My recollection is that the officer on the ground agreed, and went through to headquarters, and told them what he was doing. He was countermanded and told by his commanding officer in Derry that they were not going to have a precedent of people sitting in the street and that they were going to drive through, at which point Hume said: ‘Well if you’re going to go through, you’re going to drive over all of us, we’ll be in your way’. The people, I think, expected him to lead them. The people would not have expected him to step aside for the British army.
Logue explains how the face-off progressed:
They [the British Army] charged, firing rubber bullets, and dousing us at that stage with purple dye – and to this day I still admire the courage of the people who still sat their ground and did not move. Then the army charged [again]. I got hit with a rubber bullet, was dragged out of a garden by the hair that I once had. We got arrested. We were paraded up and put against a wall, frisked, searched. But we did not give up, and that was as much John’s leadership as anything else. We took the case with a very good lawyer, Charlie Hill, and we appealed it. We proved that the British Army did not have the right in Northern Ireland to arrest anyone under Northern Irish law. For the first time in British parliamentary history they sat up all night and legislated retrospectively to allow that.
The tactic of civil disobedience took various forms aside from sit-ins. The rate and rents strikes in Fermanagh (1970) and Derry (1971) constituted a peak of the civil disobedience tactic in Northern Ireland, and Hume was deeply involved with both strikes. Speaking in parliament of the case of Fermanagh, he defended his course of action thus:
In the course of his speech the right hon. Member for Enniskillen (Mr. West) referred to a speech made by me at the Diamond in Enniskillen on Saturday, 10th October [1970]. He wondered whether the police had given the Attorney-General a full report of my speech. Lest the police did not give a full report to the Attorney-General I shall tell him exactly what I said. I make no apology for opposing tooth and nail by every peaceful means at my disposal Fermanagh County Council in the same way as I opposed Derry Corporation. I shall continue to oppose it until we have done to Fermanagh County Council what we did to Derry Corporation. On that day I advised the people of Fermanagh to withhold their rents and rates. I advised them to elect local committees and to pay their rents and rates to those committees until such time as there was a democratic council. I advised them that if the county council retaliated by withdrawing its services they should organise lorries, collect the refuse and then go and empty it into the garden of the chairman of Fermanagh County Council. Dr. Paisley [Bann Side]: Shame. Mr. Hume: Or the garden of the nearest Unionist councillor.20
By 1971, however, Hume was beginning to believe that prioritising the political process over civil disobedience would ultimately be necessary to counter the IRA; that he needed to create a system of authority that could be acceptable to all communities in Northern Ireland. The idea of electing a local committee to usurp the authority of Fermanagh County Council was an intelligent tactic to force the State into exhibiting some modicum of accountability. However, it was also potentially dangerous because leading a programme of civil disobedience was riddled with risks: how to measure the exact length to which civil disobedience could go? How to ensure that the inevitable retaliation would not lead to lethal consequences for its practitioners? How to ensure that extremists did not exploit it to their own ends?
Moreover, civil disobedience also begged an important strategic question. The more civil rights privations were highlighted, the more the state was undermined; the effect of this process, which to an extent was redemptive, also reinforced a perception that the State was irredeemable through politics alone. When the balance tipped towards such a conclusion, a peculiar genie emerged from the bottle. The tactic of civil disobedience presupposes a way back to the normality of civil obedience once certain concessions are won. If the belief in society erodes sufficiently through the acts (and brutal reactions to) civil disobedience, how can civil society prevail? As David Trimble conceded, ‘we Unionists built effectively Northern Ireland, and we built it a good house there, but it was a cold house for Catholics’. In the hope of replacing the cold house with another more inclusive one, civil disobedience nevertheless ran the risk of eroding the foundation upon which such a house could stand.
Background to Bloody Sunday
Since 1968, for three and half years the people in Northern Ireland had demonstrated by turns in organised and in ad hoc ways to establish their rights. There had been immediate gains in 1968, but significant losses as well, through repressive legislation and in particular with the introduction of internment