I have not read all the tributes that have been made to John Hume since his death in 2020, but I doubt if many—perhaps any—of them have got to the heart of his real achievement, which was twofold. On the one hand, he prevented a settlement of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status that seemed to be a real possibility in the late seventies and early eighties on what might have been called ‘Unionist’ principles (though it could have resulted in the end, or radical decline, of ‘Unionism’ as a force in Northern Ireland politics). On the other hand, along with Gerry Adams, Charles Haughey, and Father Alec Reid of the Clonard monastery in Belfast, he found a means by which the IRA could lay down its arms without the appearance of having been defeated—an appearance of defeat that would have had very damaging consequences for the cultural and political coherence of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.
It needs to be said straightaway that the IRA were not defeated. Their achievement in maintaining the war and driving their enemies— the British army, with all the resources, both overt and covert, it possessed, together with the array of Ulster Protestant paramilitary forces—to a stalemate is very impressive. Pat Walsh, in Resurgence, his remarkable study of the resurgence of the Catholic community starting in the 1960s, suggests that, even as early as the late 1970s, elements in the IRA leadership had recognised that they could not ‘win’, if ‘winning’ meant ‘securing a united Ireland’.[1] But by that time so much energy, skill, and determination had been invested in the campaign that it had become the emblem of Catholic—especially Catholic working-class—resolve never to return to the near-50 years of humiliation they had suffered since the Westminster government imposed a separate, necessarily Protestant-dominated, government on them. An appearance of defeat would have had a severely demoralising effect on the community as a whole, the more so because so many young people were joining (with all the dangers—and excitement—that that implied), not because of any great longing for a united Ireland, but simply out of outrage at the presence of army soldiers in their streets and army helicopters in their skies.
A disruptive system of government
In the early 1980s, it was possible to believe (I certainly believed) that Northern Ireland was headed, on autopilot so to speak, towards what could have been a stable and permanent settlement. In principle, the political problem had been solved in 1972, with the ‘suspension’ of Stormont. Precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant division, Northern Ireland was the part of the United Kingdom least suitable for the establishment of a devolved government. In Northern Ireland, devolved government could only mean a permanent Unionist (Protestant) majority lording it over a permanent Nationalist (Catholic) minority. This was obviously not what the Catholic minority wanted. But the Catholic position wasn’t a simple matter of Republican sentiment. Catholic Ulster had been a redoubt of the old Home Rule movement against the new, determinedly separatist, Sinn Fein. The leading Ulster Catholic politician, Joseph Devlin, was well connected in Westminster and particularly well placed with regard to the emergence after the First World War of the Labour Party. He had been very much looking forward to continuing his Westminster career under the new circumstances that would have been created by Home Rule (a relatively minor devolution of power analogous to the present arrangements for Scotland and Wales). Even after partition, if Northern Ireland had continued to be governed directly by Westminster he would have made a formidable tribune for the Ulster Catholics. As it was, with effective power in the hands of his lifelong enemies, and all the political parties in Westminster washing their hands of responsibility for the place, it was as if he had the legs cut out from under him.