Boldness is a virtue of peacemakers, not just warriors – look at John Hume

Some may claim boldness in battle is a fine attribute.

But John Hume exhibited a different kind of boldness – a boldness combined with patience, respect, and dogged determination to use peaceful and democratic means to shape answers even in the darkest days of the Troubles.

John Hume recognised that, from the start, living for Ireland was better than dying for it; that it is more challenging of the human spirit to learn to live with one’s opponents than to defeat them.

BBC correspondent Fergal Keane wrote a passionate piece in 2017 entitled ‘Blessed are the peacemakers who did right from the very start’.

In it, he said:

“Hume, and the idea of non-violent politics he encapsulated, warrants our unmitigated admiration.

“Unless you are a maniac driven by compulsion, killing other people always involves a choice.”

The facts are clear, in every major election in NI from 1983-2001, the people overwhelmingly supported constitutional nationalism rather than militant republicanism (20.9% to 14.05%).

The Good Friday Agreement was a victory for constitutional politics and peaceful democratic change.

As Senator Maurice Manning said in the Seanad:

“In a real sense everyone is a victor today, but if there is an ideological or philosophical winner, it is the mainstream parties, especially, as I have said, the SDLP because its brand of politics has triumphed.

“In all the spinning and euphoria, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the advocates of physical force, as they call it, have yielded and conceded to the old-fashioned advocates of democratic constitutional politics.”

[Senator Manning, a Fine Gael member, made his speech on October 25, 2001 shortly after an act of decommissioning by the IRA.]

In the battle of history sometimes the facts often get lost.

The reality is that more was achieved through peaceful political change than through the violence of republican, loyalist or State forces.

Tim Attwood, Former SDLP councillor in Belfast for 20-plus years, Belfast BT11

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