John Hume, who led a nonviolent campaign for a united Ireland, has been hailed in death as a combination of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.
“There is a sense of something dimmed, of clouds rolling in, a bright light leaving the firmament,” wrote Séamas O’Reilly. “We are heartbroken and bereft, but grateful that his star could touch the earth.”
Irish people try to speak as well as they can of the deceased, but this was on a different level. “Noble in bearing, in voice, in hope,” said Shane Connaughton. “We will never truly know the debt of gratitude we owe him,” averred Darran Anderson. “He was our own Martin Luther King,” opined Geraldine Quigley. The same tone was taken by commentators in Great Britain and North America.
Hume was an unwavering opponent of political violence and played a role in ending the paramilitary bombing campaigns that disfigured Northern Ireland for 30 years — an achievement that won him the Nobel Peace Prize. He was targeted, for his pains, by both loyalist and republican gunmen. Still, he always struck me as, first and foremost, a politician, wheeling and dealing as all politicians do in pursuit of their ends.
We sat together in the European Parliament for five years. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I found him surprisingly vain and grumpy — especially so when the whiskey was flowing. Now, human failings do not detract from a man’s political achievements. Churchill, too, could be vain, grumpy, and overfond of alcohol. Gandhi had a thing about sharing his bed with some young female relatives. Mandela was notoriously stingy. MLK was no one’s idea of a good husband.
Great deeds are achieved by flawed human beings — a point that today’s statue-smashers seem unable to grasp but is, if you think about it, pretty obvious. Hume, like anyone, should be allowed his shortcomings — and, indeed, his prejudices.
The more I watched his big, shambling figure close-up, the harder it was to avoid the conclusion that on a personal level, he didn’t care for British people — including the majority in Northern Ireland who identified as British. He once accused this majority, the Unionists, of having a “laager mentality,” calculatedly casting them as the pro-apartheid Afrikaners of the piece and himself, by implication, as Mandela. For all his talk of compromise, he never liked to engage directly with his Unionist neighbors, preferring to maneuver in Dublin, Brussels, and Washington.
Hume’s reluctance to work closely with Ulster Protestants was a choice, not a political calculation. John Hume’s predecessor as leader of the constitutional nationalist party, Gerry Fitt, cultivated warm relations with his Unionist neighbors, understanding that they would need to be fully involved with any constitutional change. So did his successor as leader, Mark Durkan. But Hume, for all that he preached about agreement and consensus, preferred to put together international coalitions behind his ideas and then present them to the Unionists as a fait accompli.
All of which was fair enough. Hume had a goal and was prepared to work toward it, slyly or forthrightly as the occasion demanded. He wanted to bring about a 32-county united Ireland, and he understood, as some of the blockhead paramilitary commanders did not, that IRA violence was retarding rather than advancing that goal — putting off middle-class Catholics, prompting Unionists to dig in, and making it impossible for any British government to offer what would look like capitulations to the gunmen.
We can argue about how much the IRA ceasefire was a result of his persuasion and how much simply followed from its military failure. In truth, it was a bit of both. But once the guns had fallen silent, a political solution became possible. There is a lot wrong with Northern Ireland today. Moderate parties, including Hume’s, were destroyed by the peace process, and IRA/Sinn Fein was accepted as a mainstream movement despite never renouncing violence. Still, at least the murders and kidnappings more or less stopped.
Does that merit the apotheosis granted to Hume at his death? The current dispensation, after all, is far better, from a Nationalist point of view, than the status quo ante. If anyone was making truly difficult concessions, it was the Unionist leader, David Trimble, whose party was also smashed, but he will never get anything like the plaudits that Hume did.
Why the imbalance? Bertrand Russell offered the answer in 1937 when he wrote of “the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed.” Like Gandhi, Mandela, and MLK, Hume’s real attraction was that he was representing the side that was seen as the underdog. And our age, the age of identity politics, elevates perceived victimhood above every other value. What fools our fathers were if this be true.
