at this as a political process that was going to be built upon different traditions and mutual respect. It was going to be resolved in a political evolution … A process was going to be established that he believed could move the whole debate and discussion within a non-violent framework and could result eventually in some settlement … It was important to listen to someone who had suffered the way he had, and had shown the courage and determination he had shown, living on the ground as he was and experiencing the harshness he was experiencing. I believe it’s important to listen to the ones who are risking their lives and are attempting to do it in a non-violent way.
Ted Kennedy on his first meeting with John Hume in 1972 (interview with Edward M. Kennedy, 27 February 2006)
FOREWORD
John Hume: Founding Father
The all-party peace talks that began in Northern Ireland in June 1996 were the product of an effort that spanned decades and involved the British and Irish governments and political leaders from Ireland and Northern Ireland. The talks were cumbersome: two governments, ten political parties and the independent chairmen. The issues were complex and overlapping.
Many people contributed to that effort. But the primary architect, the person who conceived the manner in which all of the disparate parties and issues could be brought together, in a process that had some chance of success, was John Hume.
He understood the full dimensions of the conflict, especially that it was not just between Unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland, but also included the relationships between Ireland and Northern Ireland and between Ireland and the United Kingdom. When the talks finally began, they were organized in three ‘strands’, in almost precisely the manner suggested by Hume years earlier. Twenty-two months later, when agreement was reached, it was in that same format.
Throughout human history, great leaders have emerged to lead their societies into and out of conflict. The successful leaders were those who had a large and positive vision, and the courage and stamina to lift themselves and their followers to a higher level of expectation and performance.
In Northern Ireland John Hume was that leader. His vision of Northern Ireland was acquired over the years of his immersion in the difficult and dangerous life of a society in conflict; a society torn by anger, hostility, fear and anxiety. It is hard to have a grand vision when bullets are flying. But John Hume was unique, an extraordinary leader who was able to offer, in his personal courage and his sharp and incisive mind and rhetoric, a new way. In the United States we would call him a ‘Founding Father’.
Politically, the nationalists were divided between the Social Democratic and Labour Party, led by Hume, and Sinn Féin, led by Gerry Adams. They had taken different paths toward their common goal. Hume insisted that the nationalists be reconciled to a single approach, and that the only way forward was through the political process. With Adams and the Prime Minister of Ireland, Albert Reynolds, a unified approach was agreed.
A ceasefire was declared in the summer of 1994 by the IRA; it led to a reciprocal ceasefire by the Loyalist paramilitaries. That laid the foundation. Then, many others joined in building the edifice of peace.
David Trimble and Reg Empey, leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party, were essential to the Agreement; David Ervine and Gary McMichael were the leaders of small but important Loyalist parties; also small but influential were the women of Northern Ireland, led at the talks by Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar. Adams’s colleague Martin McGuinness, and Hume’s colleagues, Seamus Mallon and Mark Durkan, were major contributors, as were John Alderdice and his colleagues in the Alliance Party. Later, at St Andrews, in a critical turning point, Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson led the Democratic Unionist Party to take a major step forward. A succession of Prime Ministers created and maintained the momentum for peace: John Major and Tony Blair in the UK, and Albert Reynolds, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern in Ireland. Bill Clinton was the first American president to become fully engaged in the effort to end the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The negotiating process, which I chaired with my colleagues, General John de Chastelain and Prime Minister Harri Holkeri, was slow and difficult; it was, as I have previously noted, the product of decades of effort. Among the earlier major steps was the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985); it committed the two governments to work together to bring the conflict to an end. The Downing Street Declaration (1993) built on that; in it the British Government made clear that it had no strategic or long-term interest in controlling Northern Ireland. A series of Prime Ministers reaffirmed that policy.
Another major factor was the creation of the European Union. There the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland worked together, along with two dozen other European countries, for a common and great objective: a peaceful and a prosperous Europe. Perhaps without even recognising it, British and Irish leaders became acclimated to dealing with each other; gradually the cold hostility that had marked their relationship dissipated.
John Hume was full of life and energy, a natural leader, a man who took courageous and personally dangerous positions all his life, in an effort to find a way forward in Northern Ireland. I am deeply gratified that a history of his work with American leaders has now been written.
Senator George J. Mitchell
October 2017
PREFACE
This book is a companion to a film I made on the same subject, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, which was funded by the Irish Film Board, the BAI, RTÉ and the DFAT and has already been released. Where quotations have not been cited, the reader may assume that they derive from interviews conducted in the course of making the film.
A common assumption when a book and film on the same subject co-exist is that the book brought the film forth. My experience has been rather the opposite. In an earlier book/film, The Boys of St. Columb’s, I discovered very late in the day that I was writing a book as well making a film. It was during that production that I interviewed John Hume and discovered the breadth of his connections with US politicians. I heard about the Four Horsemen straight from the Fifth Horseman’s mouth and, in time, I grew determined to tell the story of Hume in America both in book and film form.
While elected and re-elected to the parliaments of Northern Ireland, Britain and Europe over a timespan of thirty-five years, this book asserts that John Hume’s role as a political strategist and touchstone of credibility in the eyes of politicians in the United States Congress and in the White House from 1972 to 1998 was the most decisive and far-reaching dimension of his political life. Hume has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Martin Luther King Peace Award, and the International Gandhi Peace Prize – the only person ever to win all three. His distinction is widely, though not uncritically, accepted yet the full significance of what he achieved is not so often fully understood or documented. For instance, Hume’s work in the US has not even received book-length treatment. This study attempts to do that.
Maurice Fitzpatrick, 2017
1
The Journey towards Politics,
1964–74
John Hume, the man who did more than anyone else to break one of Europe’s most bitter and intractable stalemates by creating a constituency of support for peace at the highest levels of the United States, made his first major political statement at a national level in May 1964. The editor of The Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, asked him – then an unknown school teacher from Derry – to write two articles to illustrate for the Irish Times readership in the South of Ireland the political dilemmas faced by the Catholic minority in the North. Hume’s arguments in those articles were every bit as revelatory as Gageby
