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.

Hume is, of course, not without his flaws, personal and political; but then neither was Winston Churchill, the person chosen as the ‘Greatest Briton’ in a BBC series on which RTE’s effort was based. Churchill was a drunk if ever there was one. His attitude to other races and peoples was frequently intolerant, to put it mildly.

Likewise, though perhaps not to the same degree, Hume might have been constrained at times in his understanding of unionism by his West Bank of Derry background. Seeing them up close during the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement, Seamus Mallon, Hume’s deputy for many years, who hailed from a more ‘mixed’ part of the North, had a better grasp of the ‘other’.

Nevertheless, who could deny Hume has been a towering figure in modern Irish life and a powerful advocate of the path of non-violence? And, unlike the relentless Mallon, he had a good sense of when the time for negotiating was over and the time for decisions had arrived. That leadership quality is something Hume shared with David Trimble who was, likewise, prepared to say: “It’s not perfect — but it’s enough.”

Hume has devoted his life to thinking up ways of squaring the Ulster circle. In his earliest political writings in the early 1960s, he was novel within nationalism for arguing that unionism could not be reduced to mere bigotry. It took decades for others — and not just within Sinn Féin — to accept as much.

He was vociferous in his criticisms of the old Nationalist party for its ceaseless negativity which encouraged unionists to believe nationalists had no sense of public spirit. In a sense, then, the Police Service of Northern Ireland is the final outworking of that thinking and, perhaps more than the Good Friday Agreement itself, will be his most lasting legacy. In his early years, Hume also championed other unpopular themes and causes such as the idea of a border poll which he saw as a means of taking the constitutional question out of everyday politics.

Likewise, proportional representation — which Hume viewed as a means of leaving the final status to one side and creating a constituency of unionists prepared to reach agreement with constitutional nationalists — was not popular with those who believed in ‘winner-takes-all’.

And while Gerry Adams was the first to congratulate Hume last week and associate himself with him, let’s not forget that, at one stage, the IRA seriously considered killing the former SDLP leader.

Long, long before the Provisionals saw what everyone else could see — that violence was pointless bordering on counterproductive — Hume’s was the sane voice, even when his home city was in flames. Nowadays, Hume’s frequent assertion that nothing that has happened in Northern Ireland has justified the taking of a single human life is widely accepted. That wasn’t always the case.

For many unionists, it is only fair to record, Hume remains controversial. For them, he will be eternally associated with the phrase, “it’s a united Ireland or nothing.” But, in fairness to Hume, he was merely reporting what many were indeed saying in the Bogside of Derry. With the successful negotiation of the agreement, Hume proved the Bogside attitude was wrong and that a reasonable accommodation was actually possible.

It was the same refusal to bow to old-fashioned thinking which caused his rifts with Charlie Haughey and others, even in the SDLP. They had resisted including in the 1984 report of the New Ireland Forum, alongside a 32-county republic, joint authority and a federal Ireland, a fourth long-term option — an agreed Ireland. Hume was proved right when others who regarded him as the high priest of compromise were proved wrong.

Perhaps Hume’s most brilliant idea in the latter part of his political career was the dual referendum: the idea that any political package would have to be endorsed by the two parts of Ireland concurrently. The powerful thesis was that the first exercise in “national self-determination” since 1918 would delegitimise the holding of illegal arms. Certainly, the 1998 referendum did much to snuff out the sneaking regard for violence in some quarters.

There are, of course, those who will never accept the will of the Irish people: RIRA, CIRA, éirigí and various groups claiming to be Óglaigh na hÉireann. They are the subject of a meticulous and timely analysis, ‘Legion of the Rearguard: Dissident Irish Republicanism’ by Dr Martyn Frampton to be launched next week.

That the dissidents have no mandate scarcely bothers them. As Frampton puts it, “For them, this is to miss the point; namely, that where questions of inalienable right and national sovereignty are concerned, such matters are irrelevant… History offers the ultimate validation.”

FRAMPTON makes a persuasive case that the dissidents — they themselves would dispute the term, arguing it is the Provisionals, not them, who have their views and their ways — have too often been overlooked. We all recall how Omagh and last year’s murders of two British army soldiers at Massareene Barracks, and of a Catholic policeman, horrified us all.

What tends to be overlooked in the dominant ‘end of history’ characterisation of the peace process is how frequently the dissidents make smaller strikes, and how the period since 2006 has seen a resurgence of republican paramilitary activity.

Is there cause for alarm? Probably not: even the most seemingly stable European societies are not immune from terrorism. Is there cause for vigilance? Very much so.

Does that detract from John Hume’s legacy? Hardly. His achievement has been to persuade the vast bulk of nationalism that Irish unity comes in many forms and that political unity will require powerful forces of persuasion, not coercion.

Still, it is too early to judge John Hume’s ultimate place in Irish history. We must wait a generation before an informed judgment can be made, but it is likely he will stand comparison with Charles Stewart Parnell, one of those who inexplicably never made it on to RTÉ’s final shortlist.

In the 1980s, Hume successfully campaigned for a bust of Parnell to be placed in the Palace of Westminster. Perhaps one day John Hume’s bust will adorn the parliaments in Belfast and Dublin as well. It deserves to.

’Legion of the Rearguard: Dissident Irish Republicanism’ by Dr Martyn Frampton will be published by Irish Academic Press on November 2. Price, £18.95 (paperback); £50 (hardback)