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 several aspects of governmental callousness converging to prompt Hume’s decision to 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,
