Hume, the latter-day Parnell, has earned the right to be set in stone

IT’S easy to be snide about RTÉ’s Ireland’s Greatest Figures: far too many people born in the 1970s, a blank as far as the world of science is concerned, very few people who have actually made any money, no one of an identifiably unionist persuasion, and so on.

But, for all its inadequacies and lack of historical rigour, was the end result such a bad one? The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once famously divided mankind into hedgehogs and foxes, taking his cue from a line in an ancient Greek poem: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Undoubtedly, John Hume — ‘Ireland’s Greatest Figure’ — is a hedgehog. He knows one thing but he knows it rather well, and that’s the North.