Ben Lowry: John Hume’s clear rejection of violence will play a pivotal role in shaping the coming battles over history

This week Gerry Adams said on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback that John Hume understood republicans, and the Sinn Fein politician seemed to imply that this lessened his opposition to them.
John Hume and Seamus Mallon at Downing Street in 2001. Unionists had a more positive view of Mr Mallon, in spite of his at times angry nationalism. Unionist respect for Mr Hume’s opposition to violence, however, was genuineJohn Hume and Seamus Mallon at Downing Street in 2001. Unionists had a more positive view of Mr Mallon, in spite of his at times angry nationalism. Unionist respect for Mr Hume’s opposition to violence, however, was genuine
John Hume and Seamus Mallon at Downing Street in 2001. Unionists had a more positive view of Mr Mallon, in spite of his at times angry nationalism. Unionist respect for Mr Hume’s opposition to violence, however, was genuine

Some clips of John Hume were then played to challenge that idea.

In one clip, the then SDLP leader said: “There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland today that justifies the taking of a single human life. If I were to lead a civil rights campaign today the major target of that campaign would be against the IRA.”

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It is a striking statement from a leader of the civil rights campaigns. It gets to the core of one of the most pressing debates of the coming decades: whether the Provisional IRA campaign was justified.

A recurring theme of this column is the speed with which that campaign is being rehabilitated, and the weak unionist and UK response to the trend.

There are many reasons for this, one of them being that unionists, while they might mark 1690, do not engage much in either history or defending their own image.

This is exacerbated by another key reason: that each year the number of people who remember what happened gets smaller.

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I am, in my late 40s, one of the oldest members of staff of the News Letter, and yet even I have no significant memory of the height of the Troubles in the early 1970s.

While I have a snapshot memory of driving through an Army checkpoint in 1975, I think at the edge of the Royal Victoria Hospital, with my dad as he was travelling to work there (I can date it because his office moved to the City Hospital in 1976) and much clearer memories of the 1981 hunger strikes, when I was aged nine, I only properly remember politics from the mid 1980s.

The median age in Northern Ireland is about 42, which means that half the population is under that age, and even the oldest people in that cohort — those born in 1978 — have no political memories until the late 1980s.

There are now people aged in their 30s who have no meaningful memory of the time before the 1997 second ceasefire. And there are adults in their 20s, born in this millennium, for whom the Troubles is as distant as another orbit.

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Yet there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland over age 50 who have a clear memory of the Troubles.

Given that republicans have already had such success in depicting NI as having been first an apartheid state, then post 1969 a murderous one (security forces colluding with loyalists), you can imagine the kind of success they might have when there is no-one around who remembers the context of conflict.

The republican version of the past is helped by moderate nationalists, because they too push the apartheid and collusion line. For years I have debated this with moderate nationalists that I have known or met, and asked them this obvious question: if collusion was so widespread, why did so few IRA get killed?

Why was loyalist intelligence so bad, overwhelmingly targeting Catholic civilians?

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And I have barely ever met a moderate nationalist who said: ‘That is a fair point, the British state can’t have been that brutal.’

This, incidentally, is why legacy is in such a mess. One section of the community believes that there was widespread UK official collusion and murder, and thus that there is big backlog of justice to be secured against the state and its forces.

Moderate nationalists are at risk of trapping themselves in the role of draft dodger: if Northern Ireland was so thoroughly rotten and murderous, why did they not play their part in taking up arms against it?

This is why John Hume’s comment is so significant for the historical record — about no injustice big enough to justify taking of life.

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There was, in any event, no doubt among older the generations about the SDLP rejection of violence. It was emphatically and consistently stated after the party’s founding in 1970.

In the growing battles over history, this is the single most important piece of evidence for opponents of the IRA narrative because it is enshrined in election results over a sustained period of time — that a nationalist community on behalf of whom the IRA campaign was waged mostly rejected it at the time.

After Sinn Fein first contested elections in the early 1980s, the nationalist vote always split at least 60-40 in favour of the SDLP until after the IRA ceasefires. If the small but significant number of Catholic Alliance votes is tallied, the Catholic vote was two to one against.

There were parameters to that opposition: when nationalists had an electoral choice between an IRA hunger striker and a unionist in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, almost all of them chose the former.

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John Hume was not viewed with warmth by unionists. Despite working with them at Sunningdale, he was seen as a relentless, and successful, builder of coalitions against them.

There is a telling, and unsurprising, anecdote opposite (in print edition, web link below) from a Dublin letter writer, in which Mr Hume dismissed unionists with the cliche that they have nothing to say except No (this taunt, which is still routinely deployed by non unionists, fails to show any understanding that there might be good reasons why such a community often says no).

Unionists had a more positive view of Seamus Mallon, in spite of him being a staunch and at times angry nationalist, because of his bitter denunciations of the IRA, and of the way in which appeasement of them destroyed his own party.

Also because they saw Mr Mallon and David Trimble battling to sustain Stormont in the early 2000s.

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Unionist respect for Mr Hume’s opposition to violence, however, was genuine.

A sense of discrimination and injustice in pre 1969 Northern Ireland is the great nationalist ‘wound’.

A sense of a long, vicious IRA onslaught post ‘69 is the unionist one.

Most people in both communities probably accept that the other side has legitimate grievances, just not the scale of it.

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The civil rights movement is widely commemorated and praised, yet there is little recognition of, and no outlet for, the unionist wound (which is why I think that the rapid advances for the IRA on legacy are so destabilising).

Unionists failed to see this legacy problem building 20 years ago, and some still don’t, when it is so stark.

But the victory of the SDLP within nationalism pre 2000, and the even more emphatic rejection of Sinn Fein in elections in the Republic, is recorded in statistics.

It was painful for unionists to see Bill Clinton softly and affectionately touch Martin McGuinness’s coffin in Londonderry in 2017. But this week the man Mr Clinton likened to Martin Luther King, that American icon of non violence, was John Hume.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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