of the Northern problem, which helps to explain why, that same year, Hume’s profile was noticed by Senator Ted Kennedy.
Terence O’Neill was later to say that he called what he termed the ‘crossroads’ election to give the people of Northern Ireland the chance to break the mould of sectarian politics.9 In electing a candidate such as Hume, the electorate had availed of that chance, since one of the four basic principles Hume articulated in seeking a mandate to form a social democratic movement was that it ‘must be completely non-sectarian and must root out a fundamental evil in our society, sectarian division’.10 But the tragedy was that the Unionists did not perceive it so.
Hume the Parliamentarian
The newly minted MP, elected to represent the Foyle constituency at the Parliament of Northern Ireland, had never before held political office. Nevertheless, he gave the impression of one who had considerably more experience than his thirty-two years and novice status might indicate. He had already represented Ireland in the United States during his presidency of the Irish Credit Union, and he was alert to the wider movements of the world, which were gathering pace: from Prague to Memphis equality movements were challenging traditions and demanding new approaches to politics. Such changes were the nub of what the Parliament of Northern Ireland in Stormont had stood against. Even so, Hume had considerable confidence in himself and in his approach to politics. The least parliamentary of parliaments, the atmosphere in Stormont towards the new, articulate generation hungry to establish themselves in Northern Ireland could hardly have been less welcoming. Yet, in spite of such intolerance, the sclerotic and self-perpetuating cycle of the rigged parliament was about to be unsettled by a parliamentarian of uncommon ability.
As Parnell and his party had done in Westminster in the 1880s, Hume and others managed to use the parliamentary process to shame Stormont into facing up to the injustices of the State. Those injustices included gerrymander, sectarian housing allocation and hiring policies. Increasingly, those injustices – when challenged by public protests – had in turn spawned further injustices: in the judiciary, in policing and in legislation to give validation to them. On 3 April 1969, for instance, on the floor of parliament Hume spoke of the nexus between housing allocation and political patronage: ‘Each petty potentate in each little rural electoral division allocates all the houses in that division and perpetuates himself in power. That is part of the housing policy … the political jobbery which has been a root cause of the social injustices.’11 In so doing, Hume challenged politicians for lacking the communal instincts which would have tended to the needs of all of the people they represented: ‘If the Government were to take a referendum they would find that the people would be in favour of reform. The people who would resist it would be the local Caesars who would lose their power and would not be able to shove their cronies and party hacks into jobs.’
Another consequence of this, for Hume, was that the Unionist government, by abdicating from its responsibilities to govern fairly, invalidated both its own authority and made it harder for anyone in the parliament to assert the need for democratic processes. By energetically hacking away at the root of sustainable government – respect for authority – Unionists were, Hume argued, destroying the possibility of people having faith in the State itself:
One fine day some students in this community announced that they were going to hold sit-downs and occupy public buildings. The Government react immediately like frightened rabbits and decide to make them illegal without giving any real or due consideration to what they are doing. What they have done is that they have refused to listen to grievances aired in Parliament and have left a large section of the community with very little faith in Parliament or in parliamentary democracy by refusing to listen to grievances.12
Fearing the growth of the IRA, Hume urged Unionist MPs to understand that, when the rule of law falls into disrepute, then people will feel that ‘they have a duty to break that law’.13 How, when such pleas were consistently ignored, did Hume respond? When rational argument failed, Hume, along with Ivan Cooper and Paddy Devlin – future co-founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party – and others, would occasionally take over the floor in the middle of the House and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, thereby replicating in parliament the modality of protest that existed on the street. In addition, this ongoing dialogue of the deaf in Stormont naturally elicited from Hume and his colleagues the obstructionism tactic that Parnell and his party had practised in Westminster a century earlier. (Parnell remained a central influence on Hume throughout his political life: shortly after being elected to Westminster, when he discovered that there was no recognition of Charles Stewart Parnell in the Houses of Parliament, he sought donations from MPs to ensure that a bust of Parnell was sculpted, which was placed close to Committee Room 15, where Parnell’s party had split.) Throughout his time in Stormont, Hume’s unqualified belief in parliamentary politics remained steadfast: his eagerness to put an argument on the record in Hansard, even when its practical impact seemed elusive, indicates not only a respect for parliamentary politics, but also a sharp sense of history.
Hume was later to say in Westminster that the central problem of the British having created in Northern Ireland a system based on a sectarian headcount was that ‘When one tells the majority that it can protect itself only by remaining in majority, one invites it to maintain sectarian solidarity as the only means of protection. Therefore, one makes sectarianism the motive force of politics.’14
That deeply rooted fault line of the Northern Irish State, since it was created through partition, vitiated any realistic prospect of reform from within: a perception that Hume was to reluctantly accept after the possibilities of reform from within had been exhausted. Power in Northern Ireland was so perniciously enmeshed with religious justifications for its possession that its holders had comprehensively absorbed the myth of their own entitlement. From the opposition benches Hume faced not merely political intransigence but a deeply tribal confederacy whose identity depended on not admitting any modification to the Orange State.
Membership of the Orange Order (and of the Freemasons) was almost a prerequisite for Unionist MPs. Therefore, for Unionist MPs the breaking with the orthodoxy of banning civil rights marches would have had the consequence of losing caste within their own community. If their pretext for banning civil rights marches was that they posed a risk to public security, Hume asked how (given that they identified as Orangemen) those MPs could possibly be called on to ban an Orange march, when there were grounds to believe it would equally threaten the peace? He put it to them that when members ‘have so much regalia around their necks the flow of blood to the brain is affected’.15 Under threat of a form of excommunication, the Orangemen and Masons who ran the Unionist parliament sustained its sectarian character. The effect of this tribal clustering was to block the possibility of compromise; it was a design which ensured sufficient Unionist solidarity in parliament so the majority could always prevail, but at the cost of perpetuating division within the society at large. The Ulster Unionist Party’s operation at the Parliament of Northern Ireland was like a wall prescribing clear positions: those hidden behind the wall were unable and unwilling to hear any form of opposition; those who were banished to live outside the wall, and who launched attempts to be included, were all but foredoomed.
In contrast to the bowler-hatted insularity of Unionist MPs, Hume continued to add growth rings of internationalism to his perspectives. In the following quotation (ironic given the support he later received from President Reagan), Hume traces a repressive measure in then Governor Reagan’s California through to Stormont’s legislative measures intended to contain non-violent protest. The connection between the Sacramento and Belfast administrations reveals the power of mass media as well as the butterfly effect of both civil disobedience and measures to contain it:
At the end of November last a local newspaper contained an article indicating that Governor Ronald Reagan intended that it should be an offence in California to sit, kneel or lie down on a road. The wording of this provision is rather peculiar. Who dreamt it up? It does not exist in many laws elsewhere. We must assume that someone read this newspaper report. The paper went further and referred to one of its favourite themes‚ the rebelliousness of
