Hume

In the past 30 years of our conflict, there have been

many moments of deep depression and outright horror.

Many people wondered

whether the words of our poet WB Yeats might come true.

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart".

In American terms, we would think of him as a founding father.

It's probably the greatest compliment

that an American could convey to someone else.

Endlessly, our people

gathered their strength to face another day,

and they never stopped encouraging

their leaders to find the courage to resolve this situation

so that our children could look to the future with a smile of hope.

I never regarded John as sort of of a particular party in that sense.

I mean, he was kind of aside from it all, maybe even above it.

Hard to reconcile some of the narrowness of his approach

to the breadth of his intellectual capacity.

That, and selfishness, I suppose, went hand in hand.

I believe this to be the best opportunity for lasting peace

that I have seen in the last 20 years.

It's his desire to cast the least shadow which makes him so great.

He's one of the outstanding people of modern times.

I will now end with a quotation of total hope,

the words of a former Laureate,

one of my great heroes of this century, Martin Luther King Jr.

"We shall overcome."

# We shall overcome

# We shall overcome some day... #

While on holiday with his family in Donegal in the summer of 1987,

John Hume found himself challenged by a close friend of Gerry Adams,

who urged him to talk to the Sinn Fein leader.

Hume was about to take the first step

in what would later become known as the Northern Ireland peace process.

We had been on holidays in Gweedore,

and Paddy McGrory had a summer house there.

And he would have been very friendly with Gerry Adams,

and I think he was trying to get through to John

that Sinn Fein was anxious to get involved in politics.

That would have been

the first time that I heard that kind of conversation.

Enniskillen happened when we were talking.

You know, most people don't know that.

But I think both of us saw it as something which justified

the need to talk, as opposed to

"Oh, this is undermining what we're doing".

The very purpose of our talks was to try and end all violence.

The secret talks would continue for almost six years,

until in the spring of 1993,

Adams was spotted entering the Hume family home above Derry's Bogside.

John Hume, the leader of Irish nationalism, was publicly castigated

for meeting with the political pariah that was Gerry Adams.

It was helpful that John Hume was talking to Gerry Adams,

it was helpful that he was doing so.

On the other hand, for every action there is a reaction,

and the reaction caused us some difficulties.

I had many rows with him about it.

I raised it at party meetings.

There were some who felt the same way as I did.

Now, I am standing here and telling the Government

that I believe that we have a real process of lasting peace

and a total cessation of violence on the basis that I have just stated,

and I'm saying to them, hurry up and deal with it.

We sort of wondered

"What on earth is he doing?", because by doing this,

he's blurring the distinction between their two parties.

And he's blurring the moral basis on which he's engaging in politics.

There were certainly people who had a doubt

about what he was doing.

Was it right, was it wrong? That was in private.

In public, he was vilified.

I wanted total peace on our streets,

and I knew that talking to Gerry Adams

was a major way of achieving that, by working with him to persuade him

to adopt purely political methods.

And that's why I talked to Gerry Adams.

Once it was discovered, I mean, all hell broke loose

and the media went into a frenzy.

And, you know, he lost weight.

He was finding it difficult to sleep.

So the stress was just unbelievable.

But in speaking with Adams, Hume had made himself a target

for Loyalist paramilitaries.

Senior Loyalists took him

as a threat, you know, a potential threat.

So when he actually stood up and said he was talking to Gerry Adams,

being involved with the IRA,

to people who fought the fight for so long,

he made himself a legitimate target.

Hume believed political progress could be made

if the violence could be stopped.

But in October 1993,

the IRA massacred innocents on the Shankill Road.

In retaliation, Loyalists shot dead eight men in a bar.

Party members were ringing up

and sort of saying, you know, "Those talks just have to stop".

That particular week,

when Gerry Adams carried the coffin, was just dreadful.

The phone was going non-stop,

again concerned for John, but also wondering "Where is this all going?"

Greysteel, probably because it was a culmination of so many horrors...

At the burial, John just broke down.

We were all breaking down, but to see a man,

a very strong man breaking down...

And I remember then a girl coming up to him

and saying "John, the peace talks have to go on."

"We talked about you last night around",

I think it was her father's funeral,

"and we said it's the one hope for the future

"that the peace talks must go on."

If the implication from the honourable gentleman's remarks

are that we should sit down

and talk with Mr Adams and the Provisional IRA,

I can only say to the honourable gentleman,

that would turn my stomach over

and that of most people in this House, and we will not do it.

But unknown to Hume, both the British

and Irish governments were also speaking with the IRA.

We were already engaged in private conversations,

and although one often despaired about where they would go,

it was important we did that if we were going to create peace.

If we hadn't had the secret channel to the IRA,

if we hadn't had those talks and kept them secret,

there would have been no peace process.

Exasperated by the contradictory public and private positions

of the British government, a former Derry priest who,

along with others, was acting as an intermediary

between London and the IRA,

decided to reveal to Hume the full extent of the talks.

We made a decision that Hume

was the only person who could...

who could become the natural political leader of this situation,

that there were negotiations between the British and the IRA,

that the Irish were now beginning to negotiate with the IRA,

because the British had told us.

It was time for all this back channel stuff to stop.

This had to go out into the mainstream of politics,

This was where the next natural stage was going to go. And...

..Hume had to lead it and take that charge and he had to...

..take the Adams and the McGuinnesses of this world with him.

Now, they think, they heap him with praise.

But they don't remember that they nearly broke him

during those nine months.

Finally, in August 1994, Hume got his hands on the prize.

The IRA and Loyalist ceasefires ended a generation of violence

and ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement.

Hume's decision to talk to Adams

had broken the political stalemate.

But it would come at great cost to his party, and to his own health.

REPORTER: 'Mrs Conaghan lives in the terraced houses of Anne Street,

'and they don't amount to much.

'But they are enough to show what's wrong in this divided city.

'Protestants, in the minority, call it Londonderry,

'and most of them vote Unionist.

'Catholics, in the majority,

'call it Derry, and most of them vote Nationalist.

'Anne Street is all Catholic.'

I fought for 18 years in the army for liberty and freedom,

but simply because I'm a Catholic, I can't get freedom.

To understand Hume, you have to understand

he was born into a community

that were essentially the losers in the accommodation

that happened between London and Dublin after the war of independence.

He found the Nationalist community

had sort of two reactions to that situation.

One was the abstentionism of the Nationalist Party.

The other was the militancy of the IRA,

I suppose what biologists would call fight or flight.

Hume knew instinctively and indeed from observation as well,

that neither of these approaches was going to be really productive.

And single-handedly, he set about creating

and defining a middle ground.

John Hume's first calling was to the priesthood,

but having gained his degree at Maynooth College outside Dublin,

he returned home to become a teacher.

He taught me for two years. He came at it

in a way that was provocative to me,

in that he challenged me.

One of my big memories is that he made us debate quite a lot.

And one of the debates he made us do was that we were to debate

that Nationalists should join the Unionist party

and transform it from within.

Now, that was kind of like mind-blowing to someone like me.

REPORTER: 'Allied to unemployment,

'housing is one of Derry's root problems.

'A key factor in political control in Derry has always been housing

'and the allocation of housing,

'and over the years, this has been controlled by the party in power.'

Hume began drawing attention

to the injustices he saw around him in Derry.

He wrote newspaper articles

and, already aware of the growing power of television,

he helped produce two documentaries.

Derry in those days was in a very, very distressed state.

The housing situation was appalling.

You could find houses with 30 people,

35 people all in one house, with one toilet in the back.

In this film, he talked about the two traditions coming together,

and it would only be when the two traditions came together

that Derry would reach its full potential.

The two traditions must meet.

Derry has no future unless there is a change

in the minds and hearts of people, for Derry is the mother of us all.

The poverty in Derry moved Hume and a number of others to set up

the first ever financial co-operative in Northern Ireland.

I think the credit union movement, for example, is an ideal vehicle

to spread a spirit of self-help in the community,

because it can involve the whole community at every level.

I knew how difficult life in poverty was for people,

because they couldn't borrow money,

so they had to go to pawnshops

and put their goods, etc into it, and of course

if they got loans of money, it was very highly costly.

So I thought the Credit Union movement

was the right answer for dealing with that.

My first memory of John Hume

is as a teenager. I think I was about maybe 13 or 14.

My grandmother had taken me to a public meeting

to do with this radical new idea called a credit union.

And I listened while this man,

who I didn't know was going to become the John Hume of the future

in terms of the much broader political stage,

while this then still relatively young man explained to us

what seemed almost an exotic concept

at that time, the idea of people power.

Hume helped set up credit unions across Northern Ireland.

And, for a time, Unionists in Derry welcomed his leadership abilities

as he led a campaign

to bring Northern Ireland's second university to the city.

The one wonderful thing about the University for Derry campaign

was that it brought all the citizens of the city together.

There was a huge motorcade to Stormont

to protest against the decision to place the university in Coleraine.

He was the chairman of that committee,

and that kind of catapulted him

into being the spokesperson for the city.

I want them to show that law is fair, which it isn't at the moment.

I want them to grant us our one man, one vote.

I want them to end gerrymander.

# We shall overcome... #

On the streets of Derry, there was growing agitation

at Unionist intransigence.

The protestors were inspired by uprisings around the world.

Hume drew his influence

from the leader of the civil rights movement in America.

I have a dream

that one day this nation will rise up...

..live out the true meaning of its creed.

We hold these truths to be self evident

that all men are created equal.

I was really in my 20s

when I started to figure out

this force of nature,

that lived so close by, really.

Ironically, it was after studying the non-violence

of Dr King in the civil rights movement in the US,

which I'd been reading on

and I was talking about Martin Luther King with somebody

and they said, sure, he lives in your country right now

and he's still there

I said, "You mean John Hume?" They said "Yes, of course!"

Just as courageous, just as strategic, just as vital for peace.

Free at last, free at last,

thank God almighty, we are free at last!

Watching those people, their calm dignity and their courage

and I think John was, like most of the rest of us,

you know, utterly convinced, this is the right way to go.

This is how you preserve the integrity of your moral case.

Those things were seeping back home.

Those things were catching on with young people.

Let's not forget, we were young people then.

If you start trouble today, you're only creating trouble.

Now, have a bit of sense, have a bit of sense.

Hume was being drawn into the street protests

and with his instinctive appreciation of the power of television,

he provided the emerging civil rights campaign with a new edge.

I have always said that Hume was the master of television.

He took that and he worked it to the maximum.

He had a slow, steady delivery,

a very decisive, incisive delivery,

and he analysed things perfectly.

The injustice, he was able to articulate that perfectly.

It is not our intention, nor never has been our intention

to enter into any conflict,

especially into armed conflict with our fellow citizens.

'It was refreshing to see someone like Hume,'

who was rock solid,

a stayed approach to his television work, but reliable.

He never made a gaff at that stage,

and was able to, as I say, put some shape

on what the headless chickens were all trying to do or saying they were trying to do.

John Hume was born in the Glen area of Derry,

the eldest of seven children crammed into a small terraced house,

a situation typical right across the city.

Housing, like everything else in this area, is submitted to a political test

and we failed the political test.

John grew up in fairly straightened, modest circumstances in Derry.

You know, a large family with very little coming in,

his father and mother on social security benefits.

John escaped from the straightened circumstances of fairly sheer poverty

because of the quality of his mind.

I was very lucky I passed the 11 plus exam in its very first year.

I remember going home and saying to my mother and father,

"I'm going to the college". They said, "Only the rich go there".

I said, "No, I passed an exam and the government's going to pay for me".

That generation was a very, very important watershed in the history of Northern Ireland.

They were articulate. They were determined. They were confident.

They were not bowed down

or they were not cowed by the kind of environment in which they found themselves,

particularly as Catholics in an environment

that was politically hostile to them and to their ambitions.

So he belonged to that generation

which showed an extraordinary confidence and leadership.

Any person who wishes to parade or hold a meeting

is quite at liberty to do so, provided that he holds it

other than in an area specified in the order.

On October 5th 1968,

the toxic mix of intransigence, anger and the new power of television

created an event that changed the course of history in Northern Ireland.

Ladies and gentlemen, please!

-Stand back!

-God save us!

HE CRIES OUT

Hume believed in the power of peaceful protest

and pictures of campaigners being attacked by police

helped transform the civil rights association into a mass movement.

# We shall overcome...

# We shall overcome some day... #

The events of October 5th would ultimately change Hume's life.

He was thrust to the forefront of the civil rights campaign

as the people of Northern Ireland fast approached

the crossroads of peace and violence.

# We shall overcome some day... #

Show your absolute discipline by leaving the streets absolutely clear.

I think at the time John was never going to join with the likes of me

and make a united front with the radical left. That's not the way he was inclined.

And also, I think John believed from the beginning that the way forward

was to unite the Catholic Nationalist community.

John Hume, who's well known in the houses that he visits,

for he has, in effect, become the leader of the civil rights campaign in Derry.

In February 1969, as Hume was elected to the Stormont Parliament,

he was also coming to the attention of the Dublin government.

I think Jack Lynch and Paddy Hillary began to realise

this was a voice, not just of sanity

but this was a voice of construction.

He had a concept, he had a vision.

The Citizen's Action Committee as a body

has amongst its membership, people of every political persuasion.

The chairman of the Nationalist Party...

That consistency was a huge beacon for people in Dublin

who were floundering, who didn't know what way to go.

I mean, were we going to go the arms route?

Were we going to go the peaceful route?

If we were going to go the peaceful route,

what sort of peaceful vision were we aiming at?

And Hume, in a sense,

threw a life belt to southern politics as early as '69, '70.

It was totally different from the politics we'd been used to in Northern Ireland.

The new form of politics presented by John Hume

was much more threatening to Unionism,

because he was concentrating on issues of social justice

and equality and so on.

Of course, the Unionists were scared at different levels, at different times.

They feared the strength of that relationship,

the relationship between Dublin and John Hume.

But they also feared, in my experience,

they were very jealous of John Hume.

I mean, his simple ability, for example, his ability to speak French,

for some reason, that intimidated many Unionists.

I mean, Unionists were hardly even reading the London Times

to find out what was happening outside of Northern Ireland.

So Hume was about ten years ahead, in my view,

he was ten years ahead of Unionism in exposing

the problem of Northern Ireland to a much wider audience.

But in 1969, Hume's message of non-violent protest was already falling on deaf ears,

especially in his home town.

With this much hatred about, peace seems a forlorn hope.

From the top of the flats, the Bogsiders had the clear advantage of height

for their hail of rocks and petrol bombs.

We are not doing this for publicity, we're doing it to defend this area against the police

coming in and slaughtering the people that live in it.

If the police walk in, we will just clobber every last one of them.

The violence on his doorstep forced Hume

and his colleagues to reassess their strategy.

We realised very quickly that you can only march people up to the top of the hill and down again so often.

So the civil rights marches became redundant.

We realised if you were going to change things,

which we had to do, then you have got to have the power to change them.

And the only way you had power was through the ballot box.

As the Unionist Prime Minister,

Brian Faulkner, attempted to placate nationalists,

Hume helped form a new political party, the SDLP.

Most leadership contests or choices are compromises,

and Gerry was leader. A very good politician.

He hadn't the thought process that Hume had.

He hadn't the strategic noose that John Hume had.

He hadn't the cuteness of Hume.

If one looks at it from a Nationalist perspective,

they will have an equally dark view of Ian Paisley

and his responsibility for causing the Troubles,

but we would have regarded, in 1969, 1970,

the leading members of the SDLP as carrying a heavier responsibility

than Paisley for the onset of the Troubles.

I'm not sure that I would hold that view now,

but I'm telling you what I thought then.

As the chaos on the streets of Derry and Belfast grew,

the British government deployed troops

in an attempt to quell the violence.

Even though Dublin was Hume's main point of contact,

he was already looking further afield for support,

and in 1969, he made his first trip to America.

There was no publicity in Boston for that visit,

because John was not known.

And if any lesson was learned from that -

and I think John began to learn the lesson -

the lesson was that the power that mattered

was not the power of local Irish America,

but the power of Washington,

central, politically-based Irish America.

And, as usual with John, I think he was a quick learner.

In his subsequent trips to the states,

the focus was almost entirely on Washington

and what people at a federal level could do to assist.

Hume was single-handedly internationalising the conflict.

While Republicans would raise dollars in the bars of Boston and New York,

Hume sought to build long-term relationships on Capitol Hill,

forming a transatlantic partnership with one of America's most powerful senators.

John charmed Senator Kennedy and also educated him.

And he was not only impressed with his Irishness

but with his knowledge and his political ability.

I mean, I think he had a personal touch,

in the political arena that Kennedy respected.

I think he sort of saw that combination as something,

that he tried to be in the United States Senate as well.

John Hume was a pillar of enlightenment for us,

about Northern Ireland,

both in terms of the politics of it and in terms of the substance.

He just admired John Hume for his wisdom and his vision.

Ted Kennedy was really the best politician I've ever met.

He saw things that others didn't

and he was willing to really push for it.

What Hume did here was develop an alternative to the IRA within the American electorate

Having lost two brothers to assassins' bullets,

Kennedy was very taken by the non-violent approach, felt it was the right way to go.

John also, I think, very importantly

represented an alternative

to what was perceived to be

an argument that only violence could attain Irish unity.

And he was mindful of Parnell

and he certainly was mindful of O'Connell,

and he understood the role that violence had played in Irish history.

But he was prepared to take that to a new level of discourse

and to say, I represent the tradition of King and Gandhi,

and we can achieve the same end...

..absent violence.

I'm very convinced that this was an absolutely profound change

historically in the American dimension

to the Anglo Irish and the Northern Ireland problems, for this reason:

If you go back in the 19th century...

Parnell, Davitt, and coming into the early 20th century,

Pearse, De Valera, they all went to the US.

They met Irish American members of congress.

They addressed large gatherings of Irish Americans in New York and Boston.

And of course it was useful that they did that,

but it actually had no effect whatsoever

on the organs of power in the US,

which is to say the Executive, the State Department,

the White House, they just ignored this completely.

The difference that was made by Hume's strategy,

and it's absolutely enormous and crucial,

is that he used the power of very, very powerful Irish-American politicians

directly on the White House.

One week in 1972

was to change the face of Northern Ireland at home and abroad.

We had a civil rights march on Magilligan Strand

because that was near the prison

where people were interned, imprisoned without trial,

a major attack on fundamental human rights and civil rights.

And our march on that beach was attacked by the British Army with rubber bullets.

GUNSHOTS

Could you tell me on what authority you're holding us back?

This is a prohibited area.

-You're not allowed in a prohibited area.

-Under what law?

-Would you ask those men to stop firing rubber bullets, please?

-They will not...

'The very fact that they did that'

on a beach where there couldn't possibly have been problems caused by marchers,

I was worried what they would do in the streets of a city.

Concerned, Hume made it clear he would not be attending the march

planned for the following Sunday in Derry.

He sat upstairs and he looked out the window

and felt very, very lonely because it was a huge march

and he said to himself, "I'm just finished politically".

GUNSHOTS

But Hume's fears were realised as the day would become known

across the world as Bloody Sunday.

People go marching peacefully

and are shot while doing so.

This means in effect that all channels of expression are cut off from them.

As a politician, you think the hardening of opinion is going to be a lasting one?

I wouldn't have any doubt about that.

In the wake of Bloody Sunday, the Unionist Government limped on

but soon collapsed, and within two years,

Hume would get his first, and only, taste of government.

The Sunningdale agreement was London's first attempt at power-sharing

and Hume was installed as Minister of Commerce.

But through the Ulster Workers' Council strike,

Unionists brought down the agreement and the government.

Even though Sunningdale collapsed,

Hume's political rise continued

and in 1979, he became leader of the SDLP,

the same year he was elected to the European Parliament,

taking his message to a new arena.

When we remember that the peoples represented in this chamber,

twice in this century alone, slaughtered one another

by the million with a savagery that has been unparalleled

in human history, and yet they had the vision and the strength

to rise above it and create institutions

that allow the peoples of Europe to grow together at their own speed.

Is it too much to ask, Mr President, that we can do the same for Ireland,

to create institutions which will allow the people of Ireland

to grow together at their own speed?

The whole ethos of that, the whole spirit of it,

I think, intrigued him enormously

and furnished him with, I think,

the template that he used constantly

as the template for the solution of the Northern Ireland problem.

It is about people working together, spilling their sweat

and not their blood, etc.

You know, all of that, which became known to all of us as Humespeak,

derived, if you like, from the experience

of the European Union as a peace-making, peace-generating project.

He was one of the most effective politicians in the European Parliament.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

He was what I would call not a working politician

on the floor of the house, or in committees,

he was a social politician, mixing at night very often

with leaders in European political life,

including European commissioners.

And very often successfully influencing them.

And, in fairness, on occasions, in the interests...

the best interests of the people of Northern Ireland.

So he had tremendous influence.

NEWSREADER: The ritual clanging rang through the streets of Belfast.

Whistles and car horns were added to the clamour.

NEWSREADER: The body of Raymond McCreesh was taken from hospital at eleven minutes past two,

12 hours to the minute after his death in the Maze.

The IRA hunger strike and the rise of Sinn Fein in the early Eighties

would cause the two governments to try to find another way

through the seemingly intractable violence.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement gave the Irish Government a say

in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time in over 60 years.

Hume's influence was beginning to bear fruit.

We're not under any illusions that today's agreement will produce

instant peace and stability or indeed can be regarded

as a final settlement.

What it does do, in my view,

particularly the creation of a new inter-governmental institution,

is give an opportunity for making progress

towards peace and reconciliation.

I'm sure he wasn't asked about every single phrase

but I think one could be very certain that, first of all,

the agreement reflected a kind of a technical outworking

of the kind of compromises that Hume had sketched out, really,

a decade or more earlier.

Regaining support from the minority which had been drifting

towards the IRA and Sinn Fein,

which, in fact, was fundamental,

because my calculation had been...

our view was that,

if we could do this successfully, then the IRA would have to

reconsider their position

and realise that the stalemate between them and the British Army,

that they would need to consider whether violence

was getting them anywhere

and consider moving in a democratic direction.

But the Anglo-Irish Agreement was also, in large part,

due to the relationships Hume had built in Washington.

'The four leading Irish-American politicians who have concerned themselves

'with Northern Ireland have become known as the Four Horsemen.

'The best known in Britain is Senator Teddy Kennedy,

'perhaps the president-to-be.

'Then there's Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

'Senator for New York and ex-ambassador to the UN.

'Hugh Carey is Governor of the State of New York.

'And Tip O'Neill of Boston

'is Speaker of the House of Representatives,

'one of the most powerful men in America.'

That is when the Four Horsemen and my father's role

as Speaker with Ronald Reagan

came to a point.

They wanted any number of things.

They wanted to give my dad what he wanted in Northern Ireland

because they needed other things with actions going on

in central America.

And they wanted a trade-off.

My father was not prepared to give them one

but he held Ronald Reagan's hand and asked that,

in a meeting that Reagan was going to have with Margaret Thatcher

coming to the United States and speaking before Congress,

that if he allowed her to speak before Congress

he wanted Ronald Reagan and the administration

to let Thatcher know that they wanted peace in Northern Ireland.

So I would appeal to the British Government to re-examine seriously

its own role in Northern Ireland.

The problem of Northern Ireland...

APPLAUSE

..will not be solved if it is permitted

to become a political football in British politics.

When Mrs Thatcher came to Washington in early 1984,

the Anglo-Irish negotiations had virtually broken down.

This was after the famous "Out, out, out" speech.

O'Neill took her into his office

and showed her the photographs of his family ancestral place.

I mean, there was hardly any building there, in Inishowen,

which John had taken him to,

and it became a huge emotional issue for O'Neill.

And he pointed out to Mrs Thatcher, you know,

that this was a huge part of his inheritance

and of Irish-Americans' inheritance and it was essential

that peace should be achieved, etc.

But Reagan actually gave it to her straight,

because O'Neill told him to.

And O'Neill told him to because John Hume told O'Neill to do that.

And this is something that nobody could match around the world.

I mean, even the Israelis would have a hard time getting that stuff,

or the British.

And in this case, it meant Mrs Thatcher enduring the discomfort

of being told by Ronald Reagan

what to do about a part of her jurisdiction.

And she went ahead and did it.

'Democracy was done to death in Downing Street

'by Margaret Thatcher.'

Yes, democracy was murdered in London.

Despite Unionist anger,

the Anglo-Irish Agreement had little impact.

The IRA continued with its ruthless campaign.

Yet, within just a couple of years, John Hume would be meeting

the Republican leadership in a West Belfast monastery.

His argument was he would speak to anybody

who could save a life,

and his argument was there are 20,000 soldiers on the streets,

they haven't done anything to further the situation.

If I can save one life by talking to somebody, I certainly will do it.

A man called PJ McGrory,

a friend of mine and my solicitor for a very, very long time,

had said to him, "Watch what's happening within Sinn Fein".

We get to the point where Father Alex eventually

writes to John Hume.

To his astonishment and great pleasure,

John was in touch with him within a day of receiving the letter.

He was on the phone to him and was in Clonard Monastery the next day,

and met me within... as quickly as we could put the meeting together.

It was a very, very short period.

He responded, notwithstanding the sort of rivalries,

different analysis, different upsets

9between all of the players,

he came immediately to this, and in my view,

he came with a good heart to it.

I don't give two balls of roasted snow, Jim,

what advice anybody gives me about those talks because I will continue

with them until they reach what I hope will be a positive conclusion.

I was all in favour of discussion.

I was all in favour of bringing them in.

I was all in favour of using everything I could

to end the awful violence that I had seen at first hand.

But I was also in favour of getting a price.

Only two things can happen as a result of our dialogue, as I keep repeating.

Either we fail or we succeed. If we fail, nothing's changed. If we succeed, everything's changed.

In my view, the mistake was made

in that the price was not laid down from the word go.

If you want into the democratic process, grand, you're welcome.

But you can't be in the democratic process

at the same time as you carry out acts of violence.

Adams' initial price was a visa to visit America,

and the White House and Capitol Hill looked to Hume for guidance.

Senator Kennedy began making phone calls to President Clinton,

explaining what he had heard.

And President Clinton's

initial reaction,

like almost everyone else's was,

"We can't do that? What's Hume saying? Adams is a terrorist".

And Kennedy said, "No, you've got to understand what's going on".

"Hume is convinced that Adams is ready to make this huge decision

"to move towards peace and reconciliation

"and end the violence".

By backing a visa for Adams while the violence continued,

Hume knew he was going against the advice of many in his party.

The stress was beginning to take its toll.

I think that the IRA treated him like dirt for a period of time.

I actually was in a position to see him suffer politically.

And he used to visit me quite often in those days,

he visited a whole lot of people, but he came to my house,

and, I mean, the tension was unbearable.

It is the best opportunity in 20 years that I have seen.

And the Prime Minister describes me in that statement

as courageous and imaginative -

why has he rejected my proposals before he's talked to me about them?

He must have been smoking 60 cigarettes a day in those days,

and it was unbearable.

Some days I used to say to him,

"Don't take it, John. Just go out and slap them back".

Hume persevered and eventually, in 1997,

he was back to where he'd started 25 years before...

in negotiations based on the same principles of power-sharing

and all-Ireland bodies that had led to the Sunningdale Agreement.

At the core of Hume's belief was the need to resolve

three sets of relations - between Ireland and Britain,

north and south, and those within Northern Ireland.

Now amid talks about talks

and negotiations based on those principles,

Hume's vision was becoming a reality.

In addition to being an architect,

really THE architect of the process,

John was an indispensable force

to keep going. That is, no matter what the problems,

no matter how difficult or hopeless it seems,

we've got to keep this going.

And he reminded me personally often,

and he reminded the other Northern Ireland participants often,

of what was at stake.

John likes to know the principles and what the bottom line was.

I mean, John would never be on the drafting committee

and standing orders would bore him anyway.

But he kept...

His unique piece is being able to filter in and out to everybody.

And as I recall that week, in the final negotiation week,

John was about all of the time.

When you were standing, often for what seemed interminable amounts of time in corridors,

and waiting for the next meeting,

John would kind of sidle up to you and say...

Draw you aside a little bit and say, "You know, I think if you look

"at this or you look at that, you might find a way through this".

And that was his... He was eternally sort of prompting

and pushing and prodding the thing forward.

And did it almost like a kind of independent adviser.

I mean, you know, he wasn't... I mean he was obviously

very conscious of the Nationalist position, don't misunderstand me,

but I never regarded John as of a particular party in that sense.

I mean, he was kind of aside from it all, maybe even above it.

I now declare this plenary session adjourned sine die.

APPLAUSE

'The whole world is watching what's happening here today on this very historic day,'

locally, nationally and internationally

and that strongly I think strengthens the whole mood among our people

which is very powerful in all sections of our people

for agreement and for peace and stability.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And for a moment, Hume became a pop star.

CHEERING

'It's a very big thing in my and my family's life

'and our band's life that we were invited'

to be a small part of what was

a tectonic shift in Irish politics.

APPLAUSE

The Nobel Peace Prize followed for John Hume and David Trimble,

the leaders of the moderate parties that guaranteed the peace,

but were eaten up in the process by the extremes.

'Getting agreement in Northern Ireland was central to resolving the problem,'

because as I have always said,

it was the people of Ireland who were divided, not the territory.

And when people are divided, the only way that a problem can be resolved is not by violence,

which will only deepen the division, but by agreement.

You can see the house where I live up there.

The black and white tops.

In 2004, Hume stepped back from frontline politics.

Although struggling with the effects of ill-health,

he remains a very public figure around his beloved home town.

Ten years ago, John was in Austria for a peace conference

and he became very ill

and this resulted in three major abdominal operations

and a period in intensive care with a ventilator.

I think at that stage he suffered some brain damage

so he has quite severe memory problems.

These weren't manifested too quickly,

but increasingly, since he retired,

his memory difficulties have increased.

There's a party from Canada who's walking the walls, John.

-Well, welcome to Derry. ALL:

-Thank you!

Whereabouts in Canada do you come from?

Montreal, and Ottawa.

In Ottawa? So you used to speak French then?

-I do.

-We still do!

-Vous parlez francais toujours?

-Oui.

-Bienvenu a Derry.

-Merci.

'He keeps himself very busy. He is quite independent.'

He goes to his Derry City matches.

He goes to the local every evening.

He, um...

He stays very much involved in events in the town

and does a bit of walking

so... so hopefully that will continue.

Goodbye!

'I used to reflect about how it took so long to get to where we now are.'

'And one of the reasons is that there wasn't somebody prepared'

to break the cycle, and John Hume did that.

The three together.

CAMERAS CLICK

APPLAUSE

'I have no doubt that he will be seen as the catalyst for the entire peace process'

and the visionary who saw it before anyone else did.

He's the one who went to Adams and said, "Hey, look, let's talk".

He built the support in the United States.

He got Ted Kennedy and the others involved.

And he got Bill Clinton to engage and see the possibilities.

I think that's how he'll be seen. It would not have happened without John Hume.

He's seen as a man who cares about the human person,

and the dignity of the human person and that's what he champions.

He champions a world in which that dignity is honoured and vindicated.

Would you ask those men there to stop firing rubber bullets at the women, please?

The Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985,

the Good Friday Agreement and everything that has flown from that.

The fundamental policies set out by Hume

were the policies in those successive agreements.

And that's why I say, without any hesitation,

that the leadership of Irish Nationalism

moved from Dublin to John Hume for 30 years.

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