University, and commended the proposed Californian measure to this Parliament.16
Yet the Unionist Party continued to ban marches and stymie reform. In one instance, when Prime Minister Brian Faulkner removed protesters’ barricades, Hume said angrily in an improvised interview in Derry: ‘If Faulkner thinks that the taking down of the barricades here today means that the people of this area have withdrawn their opposition to the regime, then of course he is being very deluded.’ When hope of effecting change through their political representatives, through demonstrations or sit-in protests diminished, Hume warned that then some people would embrace hopeless methods out of frustration. Hume was to give this message to senior American politicians when he began his process of educating them about the origins of the IRA, and as an MP in the Parliament of Northern Ireland he conveyed the same point. In one of the great counterfactual propositions of twentieth-century Irish history, the question raised by Hume – how could political leadership have contained the anger of the minority by making basic concessions and allowing their voice to be heard – still rings down the years:
A large section of this community are a permanent political minority and over a long period of time they have felt that they have no part in the decision-making process. This causes frustration and the frustration is all the greater when those same people know that their elected representatives are not being listened to … What does a person do then? He turns to another method of drawing attention to grievances, and in any democratic society these methods should be left open. The people then go on to the streets in the mass demonstration … It has been quite clear that this is a method of protest which is not permitted for long in this community … The third or final method of protest is the protest whereby a person draws attention to his problems by sitting or kneeling down in a public place. Now that is to be wiped out. Surely any intelligent person judging this situation would see that, when one systematically removes all means whereby people can air their grievances democratically, one thereby creates an explosive situation … militancy can only be strengthened by such intransigence.17
Here, Hume attempts to expose the connection between incitement to hatred and acts of violence on the street and, as a corollary, to impugn the actions of Ian Paisley, who was to cloak himself in violent rhetoric for the duration of his political career until the peace process in the 1990s. Hume identifies the ways in which extreme Loyalists and Republicans became objective allies in word and deed:
Nothing at all is to be gained from extreme speeches. It is worth pointing out that when one takes up an extreme position in politics one depends upon extreme opponents, on the development of extremism for one’s survival … The victory of the policies and politics of people like the hon. Member for Bann Side [Ian Paisley] depend on a break-down of law and order. If law and order do not break down they are defeated and shown to be wrong.18
As both a preacher and politician, Paisley had, even in the 1960s, perfected the dual approach of rallying people by infusing theology in politics, which meant that when he had a political setback, he could always 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
