Cunctator

John Hume and the Very Long Good Friday

I wrote this essay following the death of John Hume in 2020. I have decided to publish it here, almost three years on, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

The most important thing to understand about John Hume is that he was a zealot. In a political landscape dominated by intemperate, single-minded fanaticism, he too was an intemperate, single-minded fanatic. But while others were fanatics for dark sectarian fantasies and darker sectarian fears, Hume was a fanatic for peace, moderation and reconciliation. Most of his obituaries mention the apparent paradox that Hume’s ultimate victory came at the price of his party’s eclipse, and in so doing rather miss the point: as far as Hume was concerned, his party only existed in order to advance the great cause that had called it into being and Hume himself into politics. That cause was nothing short of the imposition of something vaguely resembling normality – of the right, actually, to not have to worry about politics – on a polity whose very existence was based on the absolute supremacy of politics.

By Hume’s own account he only became political because politics itself forced him to be. A natural businessman blessed with a fundamentally entrepreneurial frame of mind, he was instrumental in the birth of the Credit Union movement in Derry and believed that the social disaster that the city’s Catholic majority languished in could be solved with a little bit of capital here and there: if Derry’s Catholics could earn good money they would be able to pay higher rents, provide for their families, move out of the city’s overcrowded slums, and live the sort of happy, productive and purposeful lives that had always been denied to them. Were Derry an ordinary city, were Northern Ireland an ordinary polity, then we would presently be marking the death of an apolitical philanthropist, not a statesman. We mark the latter because Derry was categorically not an ordinary city and Northern Ireland not an ordinary polity: we mark the latter because the Londonderry Corporation blocked Hume’s house-building projects. Hume was no fool and immediately realized that they had only done so in order to maintain the infamous gerrymander. A remarkably stubborn man, he thus entered politics with a profound grudge against politics, a grudge that would only intensify as the political situation spiralled out of control and the province entered a state of low-key civil war.

That this was Hume’s background is critical to understanding his leadership and management of the SDLP, a subject that is often a cause of considerable confusion. To greatly simplify a very complex situation, during its early years the SDLP was divided between a ‘Red’ faction that was more socialist than it was nationalist, and a ‘Green’ faction that was not socialist at all.¹ Hume did not rightly belong to either camp, but was widely seen as closer to the ‘Green’ faction due to his intransigent stance on the need to include the participation of the Irish government in any future constitutional arrangement or peace process. As Hume’s star rose, the ‘Red’ faction (always in a minority) largely the left the party, but the SDLP did not become a stronger and better-organized version of the old Nationalist Party as the bulk of the ‘Green’ faction intended. Instead, Hume maintained the SDLP’s ideological incoherence, centralized power within the party, and cracked down hard on local activists and operatives who tried to do their own thing. Most of this was anathema to political heritage of the ‘Green’ faction, and all of it was very questionable from an electoral point of view. Yet all of it was quite logical from Hume’s own perspective: he was not interested in personal political power, but in pushing forwards his political strategy. To Hume the SDLP mattered because it gave him a platform, and its relative electoral success mattered because it gave him clout and a seat at the negotiating table (at least when there was one). Set against these considerations, the party’s long-term health was of little concern: the party, after all, was not the project.

To look at Hume’s career in retrospect is to observe the workings of a highly logical mind operating with sustained, calculated ruthlessness in pursuit of its ultimate aim. Hume’s single-mindedness meant that he was often perceived by colleagues and opponents alike as a mercurial, even erratic, figure; as an inconsistent and basically dishonest politician prone to alternating between obstinate bellicosity and opportunistic calls for compromise. This widespread failure to see the full picture suited Hume (who did not care if other politicians thought ill of him), as his strategy was conditional on opacity: Hume intended to lure other actors into difficult positions from which they could only extricate themselves by swallowing their pride and accepting the need to compromise, and that could not be done if it were obvious that he was doing it.

Hume, with his small businessman’s brain, understood that war is an expensive business and that money tends to run out rather faster than the supply of fresh recruits, particularly in the context of civil strife. Thus, the fulcrum of Hume’s strategy was a concerted attempt to force the IRA to enter into negotiations – at first with him and then with other parties – by putting pressure on their finances. He did this by cultivating ties to prominent Irish American politicians who had grown sick at seeing members of their community contribute, for reasons that amounted to little more than sentimental delusion, to continued carnage.² To actually make a serious move in this direction, a completely credible supporting voice from Northern Ireland – one that could not be dismissed as a sell-out or a traitor – was required and Hume was completely, devastatingly, credible. This move, Hume’s masterstroke, came with the additional benefit that close association with some of the most respected politicians in the United States increased his own clout when dealing with the British and Irish governments. It was also a personally dangerous gambit, one that could very easily have resulted in Hume’s death: it is known that once it became clear that Hume’s American campaign was working – that while donations had not dried up, they were certainly decreasing in volume – the IRA gave serious consideration to having him murdered. Moreover, there was a secondary physical risk: if Hume’s plan worked and the IRA talked, that there had been discussions between the two would become public knowledge. At which point Hume, and the entire membership of the SDLP, would inevitably move higher up the target list of the Loyalist paramilitary organizations, and they were already quite close to the top. Hume pressed on regardless.

In the end, Hume, like Fabius, won. Bit by bit he won. Northern Ireland is far from being an ordinary polity, but it is infinitely closer to being one than it has been at any point since its creation a century ago. In response to his death, fine words were said of him by Unionist politicians – people who once considered the man to be an enemy of the state. Fine words, too, were said of him by politicians from Sinn Fein – people who once considered having him shot. In both cases, these fine words were even mostly genuine. None of this could have happened without Hume’s zeal, his stubbornness, his single-minded fanatical determination; and while what he wrought may well have been to the long-term detriment of the political party that he led, it has been to the massive and undeniable benefit of everyone living in Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland, and on Great Britain as well.

1. On his first visit to an SDLP meeting in the old Nationalist Party heartland west of the Bann, the party’s first leader – veteran Belfast socialist Gerry Fitt – is said to have looked despairingly around the hall before audibly muttering ‘where are all the fucking socialists?’

2. The most prominent of whom were Tip O’Neill (at the time the Speaker of the House of Representatives), Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and New York Governor Hugh Carey. Which is to say, the most prominent were very prominent indeed.