John Hume in America: From Derry To DC

By Maurice Fitzpatrick

In John Hume in America: From Derry to DC and its accompanying documentary, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, Maurice Fitzpatrick chronicles the rise of John Hume from the riot-torn streets of Northern Ireland to his work with American presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, and the United States Congress to leverage U.S. support for peace in Northern Ireland.

Hume is widely considered the architect of the Northern Ireland peace process, and he engaged the attention and assistance of the “Four Horsemen”—Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hugh Carey, and Ted Kennedy—to his cause, lending his effort worldwide credibility and putting significant pressure on the British and Irish governments to strive for peace.

Supported by the Hume family, Fitzpatrick’s critical work is the missing piece in the jigsaw of Hume’s political life, tracing his philosophy of non-violence during the Civil Rights movement to his indispensable work with allies in the United States towards the creation of a new political framework in Northern Ireland. Both the book and its companion documentary will be of keen interest to historians and students of political science and Irish, peace, and conflict studies, as well as non-academic audiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268106515

Maurice Fitzpatrick

Maurice Fitzpatrick is a film director and author of a number of books, including John Hume in America: From Derry To DC (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). He is the 2020 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University.

Book preview

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 Timesreadership 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 had hoped, and they underlay much of Hume’s political thinking since that time.

In 1964, Northern Ireland was conspicuously absent from print reportage in the South, and consciously avoided by the national broadcaster. Radharc in Derry, a documentary film made in August 1964, a few months after the appearance of Hume’s Irish Timesarticles, only aired on RTÉ twenty-five years later, and was introduced thus: ‘In an act of self-censorship the then controller of RTÉ, Gunnar Rugheimer, decided that this material was too sensitive for transmission and the programme was shelved.’ The sensitive aspects of the material meant the way division and discrimination were highlighted. The plight of the Northern Ireland Catholic was met with official indifference in Dublin.

Yet the articles Gageby commissioned were novel. They argued that the question of Northern Ireland was neither resolvable through the irredentist claims of the Irish Constitution, nor was it a matter which Dublin could properly ignore and the Irish government, led by Seán Lemass, was beginning to acknowledge that fact. A few months after the articles were published, a tentative detente began between Dublin and Belfast: Taoiseach Seán Lemass and Prime Minister Terence O’Neill met at Stormont in January 1965 and in Dublin in February 1965, the first time that the Taoiseach and Prime Minister of Northern Ireland had met since partition.

In the 1960s, Hume was beginning to gain prominence in Derry – as a public debater and as a businessman in an initiative to smoke the salmon catch in Derry and export it. He had written an MA thesis focusing on the North-West region, which later led to his making a documentary about Derry, A City Solitary. It was on the basis of A City Solitarythat Hume was asked to write the articles for The Irish Times. Entitled ‘The Northern Catholic’, Hume addressed the complete disaffection and disenfranchisement felt by the Catholic population who lived in Northern Ireland. Equally, though, Hume expressed the inadequacy of the response of the Nationalist Party to these dilemmas. In the minds of young people in the Catholic minority, he wrote, there was a ‘struggle for priority’ between the realities of social problems – unavailability of housing, unemployment, the push to emigration – and the hackneyed slogans championing a United Ireland.

Hume was anxious to highlight the faults of Nationalism in Northern Ireland for holding up the ideals of a United Ireland as a panacea to cure profound underlying problems, which would endure irrespective of any alteration to the constitutional arrangements. The magical thinking of Nationalism was, he argued, an excuse for having failed to deliver any real political gains to its electorate:

In forty years of opposition [the Nationalist Party] have not produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economics plane to the development of Northern Ireland which is, after all, a substantial part of the United Ireland for which they strive. Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans … It is this lack of positive contribution and the apparent lack of interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe that the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and immature and therefore unfit to rule.¹

Having stated the negative perception of the Northern Catholic, Hume then proposed a new approach which would enable an exit from the futile bind that the Nationalist Party represented:

The position should be immediately clarified by an acceptance of the Constitutional position. There is nothing inconsistent with such acceptance and a belief that a thirty-two county republic is best for Ireland. Such a change would remove what has been a great stumbling block to the development of normal politics in the North. Catholics could then throw themselves fully into the solution of Northern problems without fear of recrimination.

Hume acknowledged the blatant discrimination in the North, but also called for the minority to address the apparatus of exclusion in the State through constructive politics, modernisation from within rather than boycott. Accepting this premise, Hume suggested that the initiative lay with the ‘Northern Catholic’ to create a politics of change by evolution:

The necessity for a fully organised democratic party which can freely attract and draw upon the talents of the nationally-minded community is obvious. It is to be hoped that the new Nationalist Political Front will create such an organisation so that we shall never in future be embarrassed by one of our political representatives declaring on television that he was not an encyclopedia when asked to produce figures to substantiate his charges of discrimination.

Finally, throwing down the gauntlet to would-be political activists, Hume asserted the centrality of an inclusive economic programme to transcend the division: ‘Community activity, in which all sections play their part can do nothing but create mutual respect and, above all, build the country with our own hands.’² Read more than a half century after their publication, Hume’s articles were extraordinarily prescient. In his insistence that the mode of change needed to be gradualist, participatory and inclusive; in his identifying the endgame for the divided people in Northern Ireland, Hume identified the Northern problem correctly. Even before the eruption of the Troubles, Hume was a diagnostician of the core principles required to heal the society’s ills.

Since the remit of the articles is an examination of the ‘Northern Catholic’, there is perhaps a disproportionate emphasis on the Catholic role as an agent of change in the political landscape of Northern Ireland. It is important to remember that other political reforms intrinsic to the Protestant community were also necessary. As Seamus Deane has written: ‘As soon as sectarianism is seen to be the basis upon which many Protestants accept unnecessary poverty (and thereby uphold the grotesquely large property holdings of this small group of [wealthy Unionist] families) then the feudal basis of Unionism will have vanished.’³ Even if the articles appear to ask a lot of the minority and not enough of the majority, they are outstanding in identifying the essential elements required of the minority to achieve an equitable settlement in the North. Remembering that the embrace of violent methods to advance political aims was at that time dormant in Northern politics, Hume’s constructive vision was a necessary antidote.

The softness of tone in Hume’s articles hardly matched the desperate circumstances in which Northern Catholics found themselves, nor did it match the fervid tone which John Hume would later, as a practising politician, often take in criticising the intransigence of Unionism and the British government which validated it. In protests such as the one to establish the second university of Northern Ireland in Derry, the ‘University for Derry’ campaign, fought throughout the 1960s, the doctrinaire indifference to the minority’s plea for justice hardened Hume’s stance. By the time he became an elected representative of the Foyle constituency in February 1969, Hume was firmly of the view that well-intentioned cross community cooperation alone would not move the Unionist government to concede basic civil rights demands.

The Early Years

John Hume was born in Derry in 1937 and was the beneficiary of radical educational reform (the 1947 Education Act) which enabled children from working-class backgrounds to access free education. Hume’s secondary education took place in St Columb’s College in Derry and he attended university at Maynooth where he specialised in French and History. He was, as his wife Pat Hume recounts, ‘the eldest of seven children, born in very poor circumstances in the gerrymandered city. So he was very conscious of politics, not the tribal politics but practical politics’.⁴ Practical politics for Hume took the form of a variety of jobs, roles and initiatives when he was in his twenties: he was a key member of the Irish League of Credit Unions and became its president at the age of 27; he taught full-time at St Columb’s College in Derry; he was a member of the Housing Association of Derry; he was a leader of the University for Derry campaign. Pat Hume remembers that he was ‘always very conscious of restoring dignity to the Catholic people of the North’.

James Sharkey, a teaching colleague at St Columb’s and later Irish ambassador, recalls that Hume was deeply rooted in history, which also informed his political views: ‘I used to drop in at the back of his modern history class. It was clear that the great constitutionalists – Grattan, O’Connell and Parnell – for Hume were not simply admirable historical figures, but they were also exemplars on whom you could base political judgements and political approaches.’ 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 Timesarticles, 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, why can we not get over our differences?’ Eamonn McCann elaborates:

John 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