Gerard Howlin: Credit union movement was the foundation of John Hume's outlook

John Hume reflected in his later years that 'there is no more constructive organisation or no more powerful organisation in this country than the credit union movement', writes Gerard Howlin

Irish League of Credit Unions president Uel Adair unveiling a plaque in 2008 in Ballydesmond, Co Cork, the birthplace of the league founder Nora Herlihy, to mark its 50th anniversary, with Mick Long, Rathmore Credit Union, and, right, John Hume, former league president. Picture: Des Barry

"You're a mad young fella, nobody will pay you back" was the response to a 23-year-old John Hume setting up a credit union in Derry, the first in Northern Ireland. Four, however, agreed to help. 

They emptied their pockets in the Roswell Hall and, with five pound one and nine pence, Derry Credit Union was founded. 

Years later he reflected that “there is no more constructive organisation or no more powerful organisation in this country than the credit union movement when you think of the good that it did on the ground". 

Today in Derry, his family and people bury a Nobel laureate and a credit union man.

In a house where the ‘shirt money’ Derry women created made up for the frequent unemployment of the men, his father Sam taught him that you can’t eat flags. 

The credit union movement was not the ultimate achievement of a young John Hume, though he became president of the Irish League of Credit Unions, aged 27, in 1964. It was the foundation of his outlook, and all he went on to do later.

In 1968, when events that would make him a world figure were still to unfold, he addressed the Irish League of Credit Unions, as its president, in Cork. 

In a little over a decade, credit unions had gone from an idea to a growing co-operative movement. Jack Lynch was the first taoiseach to attend a League AGM and Hume told him on behalf of the movement that “we are promoting modern patriotism". 

“We are living for our country,” said Hume, and “not dying for it. 

“We are spilling our sweat, not our blood, to build our country.” 

He summed up for Lynch what credit unions stood for in three words, written large on the grave of Abraham Lincoln: E pluribus unum, from many we are one. 

The essence of unity is respect for diversity, said Hume. 

It was through the credit union movement that he formulated the idea that became his life’s work.

The modesty of today’s funeral, asked for by his family and required by Covid-19, is a happy irony. John Hume did not lack self-belief but he did not require the affirmation of the crowd. 

He understood two things. Firstly that real power comes from the bottom up. That was the power of credit unions and the civil rights movement. 

Secondly, it is necessary to be prepared to stand your ground, however lonely a place that is. 

In the 1980s and early 1990s, he stood his ground, trying, failing, and trying again to begin a peace process. Negotiating with the IRA and Sinn Féin, its political wing, was toxic. But peace is made with your enemies. Difference is to be accepted.

Some see the paraphernalia of paramilitary trappings at Sinn Féin funerals and are appalled. I am amused. 

The job lot of white shirts, black ties, and berets seem like a callous insult and an insensitive reminder to the victims of atrocities. They are that. But they are not the display of strength they seem. 

The modern paramilitary-style funeral is a parody. It is street carnival for people who surrendered to John Hume. They won subsequent elections. He won the war. We live in a version of his world, not theirs.

What Hume won convincingly is the battle of ideas. I believe in the tradition of Hume, Albert Reynolds, and Bertie Ahern, that if Fianna Fáil and the Greens had gone into government with Sinn Féin, that victory of ideas could have been advanced further. 

But whether from a lack of confidence, or a want of convenience, it did not happen. 

What Hume had, and it is a rare quality, is the ability to see the world differently and then change it. Most politicians are agents of continuity and managers of the here and now. Thence they are overtaken by events.

Séamus Heaney, a contemporary of Hume's at St Columb’s College in Derry, where Brian Friel had been a decade before, remembered the young man his fellow student had become in the 1960s as “a figure of some mark and likelihood". 

“He was involved in the credit union movement and had started a smoked-salmon business, some sort of co-operative.” 

Their mutual association as mature men was often through Friel and in his Donegal home. These associations are both the intellectual scaffolding and the practical programme of what Hume stood for. 

Friel, along with Seamus Deane, also of St Columb's, and others were associated specifically with Field Day Theatre Company from its founding in 1980, a self-conscious fifth province of the Irish mind. 

They were avowedly anti-sectarian but fully alive to the sectarian imperium that ruled over them.

The rigour of their education at St Columb's was notable. Scholarship boys, they were the first of their class and creed for generations to be schooled so well. 

They were also the last generation to receive a classical generation. They knew the myths, plays, and orations than underlie our culture, and they read them in the original Greek and Latin. 

In that sense they are the end of an era and final break with the thought world of the Four Masters. Their passing is culturally a flight of the earls. But they were thoroughly modern.

The American civil rights movement, global decolonisation, entry into the then EEC, and the need to build bridges across a chasm, from which the flames of sectarian violence sprang, required new strategies. H

ume was an originator. He was an organiser on the ground and a superlative networker.

Politics, which was shaped by him, will take its course without him. For those in high places proffering homage, there is a living legacy. 

A man who grew up in a house with an outdoor toilet, could read the classics, and could lift the phone to presidents was rooted in his community. The people minded him, when, in old age, his own mind was clouded. 

His politics was about helping people. 

“Of all the things I've been doing,” he said, “it's the thing I'm proudest of, because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, North and South, than the credit union movement."

There is a new powerlessness now, and an economic gerrymandering. People have life-changing decisions made for them in financial institutions where they can never meet a decision-maker. They are blips on an algorithm. 

The Government says it wants credit unions to become a platform for community banking. Its delivery is the stuff of detail, devoid of romance. 

But the ideal is empowering and life-changing. It is an answer to alienation. 

We are in the grip of the politics of estrangement, but too little attention is paid to its causes. It can be different. In Freedom of the City, Friel articulated it: “Stand your ground! Don't move! Don't panic! This is your city! This is your city!” 

John Hume lived it. He stood his ground.

• Mr Howlin works with the Irish League of Credit Unions in a professional capacity. His views expressed here are done so in a personal capacity.