John Hume and the revision of Irish nationalism

P. J. McLoughlin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719086892
  9780719079566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847795113
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book, available at last in paperback, explores the politics of the most important Irish nationalist leader of his generation, and one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Ireland: the Nobel Peace Prize winner, John Hume. Given his central role in the reformulation of Irish nationalist ideology, and the vital part which he played in drawing violent republicanism into democratic politics, the book shows Hume to be one of the chief architects of the Northern Ireland peace process, and a key figure in the making of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. At the same time, it considers Hume's failure in what he stated to be his foremost political objective: the conciliation of the two communities in Northern Ireland.

The book is essential reading for specialists on Irish history and politics, but will also be of interest to academics and practitioners working in other regions of political and ethnic conflict. In addition, it will appeal to readers seeking to understand the crucial role played by Hume in modernising Irish nationalist thinking, and bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

1
You can’t eat a flag

Born into the working-class, Catholic Derry on 18 January 1937, John Hume was by no means predestined to become a politician.¹ Indeed, under the influence of his father, Hume was actively discouraged from any interest in politics.² In a story which he often cites, Hume tells of a time when, as a boy of ten, he and his father were observing an election meeting of the Nationalist Party, attended by the customary anti-partitionist rhetoric and flag-waving. As Hume recalled: ‘When my father saw that I was affected, he put his hand gently on my shoulder and said, “Son, don’t get involved in that stuff,” and I said, “Why not, Da?” He answered simply, “Because you can’t eat a flag.’”³ Sam Hume was more concerned with bread-and-butter issues than the constitutional question, and this attitude was passed on to his eldest son.⁴

This was evident in Hume’s earliest venture into public life. In October 1960, he joined with other local activists to form Derry’s first credit union. Seeing the success and rapid growth of this organisation in his home town, Hume became an ambassador for the credit union movement further afield. Throughout the early 1960s, he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, helping to establish new branches and spreading the creed of the credit union philosophy as a means for communities to help themselves to prosper. Within a few years, Hume had become president of the Irish credit union movement, and vice-president of the world organisation.⁵ His work with the movement reflected communitarian and self-help ideas which would remain central to Hume’s later political thinking.

For the time being, though, Hume resisted involvement in politics.⁶ Nonetheless, he was becoming politicised by various developments in Northern Ireland. Most notable was the controversial Lockwood Report of 1965, which recommended Coleraine as the site for the region’s second university. Derry had appeared the more obvious choice, with Magee College already providing a site of third-level education that was open to expansion. As a result, Lockwood met considerable opposition from both religious communities in the city. Encouraged by this, Hume took up the chairmanship of the inter-denominational University for Derry Action Committee, which sought to dissuade the Stormont government from following Lockwood’s recommendations.⁷

Hume’s belief in the potential of the Action Committee to bring together the two communities in Derry was confirmed by the huge success of a public meeting on the university issue, held at the city’s Guildhall. This event saw Nationalist and Unionist politicians sharing the same platform, and speaking to an enthusiastic audience which straddled the religious divide.⁸ Hume’s first biographer, Barry White, recalls the flavour of the speech which the Action Committee chair made to this audience: ‘His theme was the need to unite the two communities, not just for the duration of the university campaign, but for the good of the city in the longer term.’⁹ Indeed, Hume hoped that the campaign, created by an issue of common, practical concern, would develop into a more sturdy alliance between the two, arguing that such co-operation could only benefit both sides.¹⁰ This line of reasoning would echo throughout Hume’s thinking during the next three decades.

Hume’s efforts in the university campaign culminated in his leading a cross-community delegation to Stormont, and his organisation of mass motorcade from Derry to Belfast. This saw an estimated 25,000 people converging on the Stormont estate to demonstrate their support for the campaign.¹¹ Despite this, the government endorsed the Lockwood Report, and chose Coleraine as the site for the new university. Hume was severely disillusioned. Like many Catholics, he found it difficult not to read Lockwood in a political light. Indeed, for a number of government reports in this period appeared to favour the eastern and predominately Protestant part of Northern Ireland, and to disadvantage the more Catholic western counties. Firstly, the Benson Report of 1963 led to closure of various rail routes in the west, then the Matthew Report selected the Protestant heartlands of North Armagh as the main centre for new urban development, and finally Lockwood chose the unionist town of Coleraine rather than largely nationalist Derry as the site for a new university. Unsurprisingly, Catholics began to see O’Neill’s programme of economic ‘modernisation’ as one designed to consolidate Protestant power and so maintain support for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).¹²

This was certainly how Hume presented the case at a public meeting in London which was organised by interested British Labour MPs. This took place only a few months after the university controversy, which Hume claimed had proved the ‘last straw’ for the people of Derry. ‘And so the plan stands clear’, he explained:

The minority in Northern Ireland resides mainly in the western counties of Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh. To develop those areas is to develop areas opposed to the Government and to lose the few Unionist seats held there. The plan is, therefore, to develop the strongly Unionist Belfast–Coleraine–Portadown triangle and to cause migration from West to East Ulster, redistributing and scattering the minority so that the Unionist Party will not only maintain but strengthen its position.¹³

Hume went on to express his fear that such underhand action by the Stormont government threatened to damage the improved relations that had recently developed between the two communities in Northern Ireland: ‘The tragedy is that this plan comes at a time when the … problem shows more hopeful signs of internal solution than ever before.’ Most striking here is Hume’s intimation that an ‘internal solution’ to the Northern Ireland problem was possible, that is a solution which did not affect the border. Indeed, Hume was at pains to stress that it was the communal divide in Northern Ireland – rather than the political divide between the North and South of Ireland – that was his primary concern: ‘It is my belief that the problem can only fully be solved by the people there themselves and only then when the mental border that divides the community has been largely eradicated’.¹⁴ Again, Hume expressed sentiments here that would inform his later political thinking.

The challenge to traditionalism

Hume’s actions in the University for Derry campaign showed a desire to reach across to the Protestant community, and an eagerness to engage the Stormont government. But neither trait was uncommon to the generation of Northern Ireland Catholics to which he belonged. Indeed, as noted in the Introduction, a number of mutually reinforcing pressures helped forge a more forward-thinking and reformist attitude amongst this generation. This, in turn, led to increasing disenchantment with the established political representatives of the minority, the Nationalist Party.

By the end of the 1950s, the Nationalist Party had become politically moribund. Its singular focus on partition, and its uncooperative attitude towards Stormont, began to be questioned by many in the Catholic community.¹⁵ The first organised expression of this dissatisfaction came with the formation of National Unity in 1959. In essence, National Unity was a pressure group: it did not seek to replace the Nationalist Party, but it did wish to see its reform. In particular, the new group encouraged the Nationalists to create a democratically structured, grass-roots organisation, and to adopt a more constructive approach towards Stormont.¹⁶ However, National Unity did not believe that such a shift should entail the abandonment of the aspiration to a united Ireland. As one of its earliest pamphlets suggested, ‘we maintain that while there is room for more co-operation and greater attempts to understand the unionist point of view, it would be fatal to do anything to undermine our ultimate aim and ideal, the unity of Ireland.’¹⁷

Though firmly committed to this end, National Unity argued that the only way to achieve a united Ireland was to win Ulster Protestants’ support. Indeed, one of the group’s co-founders, Michael McKeown, felt that this was the chief motivation for National Unity. Recalling the organisation’s inaugural meeting, he noted the sense of exasperation with the Nationalist Party over its failure to adopt any such constructive approach towards Irish unity: ‘There seemed to be no suggestion [amongst the Nationalists] that they should ever appeal to Unionist voters or make a case on the Protestant doorstep for a united Ireland. … [As a result, w]e decided to form an organisation … dedicated to the ideal of a united Ireland brought about by the consent of the majority of the people in Northern Ireland.’¹⁸

The ‘principle of consent’ had become a phrase of common political currency in Northern Ireland by the time McKeown came to write this account, over a quarter of a century after the formation of National Unity. But in 1959, the idea that Irish nationalists should – indeed must – gain the assent of Ulster Protestants for a united Ireland represented a radical departure. Traditionally, nationalists had denied the unionist community any right of veto over Irish unity, claiming that the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland was a position manufactured by partition. But National Unity suggested that at least a section of this population would have to be persuaded of the merits of Irish reunification.

From the early to mid-1960s, as debate amongst the Catholic community fermented, National Unity was joined by a number of other groups encouraging the re-orientation of northern nationalism.¹⁹ Most significant was the National Democratic Party (NDP), formed in 1965. The NDP was itself an outgrowth of National Unity, but as an actual political party rather than a mere ginger group, and by contesting elections and thereby presenting a potential challenge to the Nationalists, it reflected a growing impatience with the latter’s failure to modernise.²⁰

Limited in its organisation, the NDP never represented a serious threat to the Nationalist Party. However, like National Unity before it, the new group did have an ideological bearing on the direction of northern nationalist politics in the coming years. Indeed, both the NDP and National Unity had established a number of core principles which were to inform progressive nationalism, not just in the 1960s, but also in the decades that followed. In essence, they advocated constructive political action: participation over abstention. Rather than restating well-worn arguments about the illegitimacy of partition and the Northern Ireland state, the NDP and National Unity spoke in favour of working the Stormont system, this to secure its reform. Towards this end, they sought to create an active, democratic political organisation, and an effective opposition to the Unionist Party at Stormont. Such an approach contrasted strongly with that of the Nationalist Party, which had little grassroots organisation, and was largely abstentionist in its instincts. Also unlike the Nationalists, the NDP believed that the social and economic conditions of the Catholic community were of greater immediate concern than the constitutional question. Thus, as with National Unity before it, the NDP maintained the aspiration to Irish unity, but argued that this could only come about by working alongside unionists and winning their assent for constitutional change. Participation, co-operation, and the pursuit of unionist consent for the creation of a united Ireland were the essential ingredients of a new approach to nationalist politics. Revisionism had taken root.

‘The Northern Catholic’: a changing disposition?

Such ideas were hugely influential on Hume. Though he was not directly involved in either National Unity or the NDP, he clearly supported their reformist agenda. This was clearly demonstrated by ‘The Northern Catholic’, a two-part article which Hume wrote for the Irish Times in May 1964.²¹ In this piece, Hume sought to capture the spirit of change abroad in his community in the early 1960s. This he did, most eloquently, giving an early demonstration of his innate ability to speak for northern nationalists. But in conveying the mood of the minority, Hume also provided the first coherent expression of his own political philosophy, articulating ideas that he would continue to hold to throughout his career. As such, the article deserves detailed consideration.

Hume’s immediate objective in this piece was to advertise th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on terminology
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 You can’t eat a flag
• 2 A united Ireland or nothing
• 3 Dublin is just a Sunningdale away
• 4 The two traditions
• 5 An agreed Ireland
• 6 Internationalising the conflict
• 7 The totality of relationships
• 8 No selfish strategic or economic interest
• 9 Two balls of roasted snow
• 10 Sunningdale for slow learners
• 11 A new Ireland in a new Europe
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index