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 temptation was prevalent in the community, and the provocation was strong, Hume did not believe in the efficacy of violence. 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
