John Hume was a great man, but not a saint

I share the reservations expressed by your correspondent Matt O’Dowd concerning John Hume (August 8) and I am sorry it is necessary to express them at this time.
By Letters
Published 11th Aug 2020, 00:43 BST
Updated 11th Aug 2020, 12:53 BST
Letter to the editorLetter to the editor
Letter to the editor

(The letter can be read here: ‘I shattered John Hume’s image when I confronted him about his attitude to Protestants’).

But we cannot have peace on this island without full equality between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

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When I came to Trinity College Dublin as a Junior Lecturer in English Language and Literature in 1968 I found myself regarded as a Protestant heretic in Catholic Ireland. An extraordinary state of affairs.

Elizabeth I, the founder of Trinity College, was excommunicated by Pius V in 1570. Nothing had changed in Ireland it seemed in the intervening years and indeed Trinity’s very survival as a university was under threat as a consequence of Archbishop McQuaid’s Lenten Regulations of 1944 and Donogh O’Malley’s merger proposals.

Even today a Protestant such as Derek Linster, a survivor of the Bethany Home of Rathgar, struggles for justice and equality in his native land.

As a Protestant I do not share the adulation of flawed human beings as saints. And I do not deny that John Hume was a great man. But the Catholic Nationalist politician I unreservedly admired was and remains Seamus Mallon.

Dr Gerald Morgan, Dublin

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Related topics:John HumeGerald MorganProtestant