John Hume, SDLP leader who stood up for peaceful nationalism and won the Nobel Prize – obituary

John Hume, who has died aged 83, was for a generation the leader of non-violent nationalism in Northern Ireland, and through his deeply distrusted talks with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams an architect of the eventual peace settlement, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble.

Leading the Social Democratic and Labour Party from 1979 to 2001, Hume argued that the IRA could be wooed into mainstream politics. To this end, he took “a risk for peace” and began secret talks with Adams in 1992, when the Provisionals were still pursuing a campaign of bombings and murders.

Criticised for lending respectability to terrorism, Hume replied with characteristic bluntness: “I don’t give two balls of roasted snow what anyone advises me. I will continue these meetings.” The resulting document became a basis for the peace process and two IRA ceasefires, the first of which ended in 1996 with a massive bomb near London’s Canary Wharf.

The process – which also had its origins in parallel secret contacts between the British government and the Provisionals – worked on the understanding that republicans could achieve political gains by ending the violence.

When the Good Friday Agreement was concluded at Stormont at 1998 and the way seemed clear for power-sharing in which Sinn Fein would participate, Hume’s global reputation as a statesman and peacemaker soared.

Consumed by politics, Hume was famed for his Columbo-like appearance and bouts of impracticality, finding himself without money at airports and declining to wear a watch.

At times he seemed the embodiment of nervous tension: friends expressed concern that the whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking Hume was driving himself too hard. But his formidable schedule was kept on course by his devoted wife Pat.

He was, nevertheless, a sharp negotiator, and a wily veteran of the cauldron of Northern Ireland politics. But Hume never secured the trust of the Unionist majority despite preaching reconciliation and eventually securing a working relationship with Trimble.

He did not help himself by comparing them to white South Africans, saying “Unionists have a laager mentality”: Hume, by implication, saw himself as Ireland’s Nelson Mandela.

Another source of friction with Unionists was Hume’s stance on the Royal Ulster Constabulary. When in 1975 the Catholic bishop of Belfast, Dr William Philbin, urged Catholics to join the force, Hume refused to back him, saying: “If the minority are to be asked to police Northern Ireland they will need to know what sort of Northern Ireland they are policing.”

Hume’s contacts with Adams were bound, if successful, to damage his own party by handing legitimacy to Sinn Fein, yet he regarded the prize of peace through power sharing as paramount. Hume’s own profile rose but not his party’s; his successors were left with a weak hand to play, a purportedly democratic Sinn Fein seeming to many Catholics more youthful and dynamic.

Throughout his career, (London) Derry was his power-base. In his constituency of Foyle, whose electorate was three-quarters Catholic, he competed with Sinn Fein with some success. Yet he was tugged emotionally by the extreme nationalism of the republican movement.

For two decades, Hume dominated the SDLP. He could be thin-skinned and irascible, especially when his sizeable ego was needled. But this sensitivity was matched by a widely acclaimed skill as a mixture of statesman and fixer, able to combine theory with practical politics.

Perhaps his greatest achievement, apart from articulating the feelings of the growing Catholic middle class, was to broker the Anglo-Irish Agreement so disliked by Unionists of all persuasions.

Hume never gave up the illusion that he could persuade Ulster’s Protestants to make the full journey to a united Ireland. “The only unity I cherish,” he insisted, “is that which has the wholehearted and freely given support of my Protestant fellow-countrymen.”

He said this as if he had never had his ears bruised by Ian Paisley, not to mention the Loyalist paramilitaries – though all these eventually shared in the Good Friday settlement.

His charisma and persistence brought results. But his preferred talking-shop was not at Westminster, nor was it among Unionist politicians. Unionists respected him as an adversary, but complained that he preferred to negotiate secretly with London, Dublin and Washington before dazzling them with a fait accompli.

This was underlined after he reached his agreement with Adams in 1993. He disclosed the outline of its terms in Washington, then Dublin, but not in Downing Street, where the reaction was cool. He then complained that John Major had not invited him to discuss the outcome.

Hume was the most internationally respected of all Irish politicians of his generation, Mary Robinson apart. The further he travelled, the higher his reputation, in Dublin, in Brussels (he was an MEP for 25 years) and above all in America, where he had real clout.

This was largely because, having despaired of a London-led internal settlement, he sought readier ears in Washington’s “Murphia”.

He saw himself, according to the Sunday Telegraph’s Walter Ellis, as “an ex officio member of the US Senate”. He was the only Irish politician invited to Senator Edward Kennedy’s celebration of 25 years in politics. He was so feted that in 1991 he expected his American friends to propose him as UN Secretary General.

Hume brushed aside jibes about his globe-trotting with the remark: “If getting drains fixed is what politics is about, then 90 per cent of people are qualified to be politicians.” He used his contacts in Brussels and Washington to bring investment into Derry.

In pursuing his dream of a united Ireland, Hume was more optimistic and more nationalistic than his predecessor, Gerry Fitt. He travelled on an Irish passport, and had a comfortable weekend retreat across the border in Donegal, decorated with a bust of Kennedy and honorary degrees from American universities.

The contrast grew between Hume’s being ignored at Westminster and lionised in the US. Lord Holme, the Liberal Democrats’ Northern Ireland spokesman and once a political activist in California, observed: “To see John at a Democratic convention is quite something. He can hardly move for his retinue of senators and congressmen.”

Throughout years of intricate negotiations, Hume showed flexibility and ingenuity, whether with Adams or Paisley, Jim Molyneaux, Peter Brooke or Sir Patrick Mayhew. Everyone respected him for avowing: “If direct dialogue can possibly succeed, then surely to God it’s my duty to try.”

Hume worked doggedly to secure Irish involvement in the North’s political institutions, and was prepared to boycott those that did not offer it. The SDLP fought elections to the 1981 Assembly, but refused to take its seats because there was no “all-Ireland dimension.”

When the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave Dublin a say in the running of Northern Ireland for the first time, triggered the mass resignation of Unionist MPs, Hume warned them they were leading their people toward UDI.

John Hume was born in Londonderry (“Derry” to nationalists and many others) on January 18 1937, the son of Samuel Hume, a clerk and riveter unemployed after service in the Royal Irish Rifles in France in the First World War and in the Free State Army. John, his parents, and his six younger brothers and sisters had to share two bedrooms.

Passing the 11-plus in 1950, John went to St Columb’s College in Derry. He then trained for the priesthood at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, for several years before deciding he had no vocation. But he retained an instinctive Catholic conservatism, which initially led him to oppose integrated schooling.

After taking his MA at the National University of Ireland, Hume returned to Derry to teach French, and in 1964 became President of the Credit Union League of Ireland. The League set up housing associations to build homes for Catholics, but Derry’s Unionist council refused planning permission.

Hume’s father had taken him as a child to an emotional nationalist meeting. He had been aroused, but put off when reminded: “You can’t eat a flag.” Later he was alienated by the nationalists’ sectarianism and their absence of any plan for achieving a united Ireland without bloodshed.

His pursuit of equal housing rights for Catholics led him into the agitations of 1968, and he became the de facto leader and theoretician of the reformist wing of the Derry civil rights movement.  As Ulster erupted into sectarian violence and rioting, the young Hume rose to prominence as the intelligent, articulate voice of non-violent nationalism, and in 1969 he was elected as an Independent to Stormont.

The next year he helped to found the SDLP, becoming its deputy leader under Fitt. The Provisionals denounced this constitutional movement appealing mainly to the Catholic middle class as “pacifist traitors”, and Hume and his family endured intimidation both from the IRA and from loyalists.

He also became a target of the security services; in 1972 MI5 circulated forged documents alleging that he had been pocketing funds raised in America.

The events of Bloody Sunday, January 30 1972, when 14 demonstrators against internment were shot dead in Derry by British paratroopers, entrenched Hume’s nationalism. Asked what the mood was in the Catholic Bogside, he answered: “Many people down there feel now that it’s a United Ireland or nothing.”

Elected to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973, he helped to build its power-sharing executive, serving briefly as Minister of Commerce in 1974 before it was brought down by the Loyalist workers’ strike.

Hume stood for Parliament in Londonderry in October 1974, losing to the sitting Unionist MP by 9,000 votes, but the next year he was elected to the Constitutional Convention. In 1976 he took time off to be an associate fellow at Harvard’s Centre for International Affairs, deepening his almost umbilical connection with America.

Over the years, a split opened between the SDLP’s Belfast members such as Fitt and Paddy Devlin, who espoused a gritty non-sectarian socialism, and Hume, who veered towards old-style Irish nationalism. Concerned at Hume’s growing influence, Devlin was expelled in 1977 after publishing a strong critique.

When Fitt failed in 1978 to stop James Callaghan’s government giving Northern Ireland extra seats at Westminster (which it was assumed would benefit the Unionists and reduce prospects for power-sharing) Hume urged a “total rethink” on unification, including the end of Britain’s pledge to Ulster’s Protestant majority. Fitt resigned, claiming that the SDLP had gone “too green”, and Hume took his place.

Hume was elected to the European Parliament in 1979; he joined the bureau of the European Socialist group and the parliament’s regional policy, regional planning, and Africa-Caribbean-Pacific committees, and would serve on all of them for the next 25 years. From his new pulpit he demanded power-sharing from Margaret Thatcher, and a declaration of Britain’s intention to withdraw.

When IRA prisoners began their hunger strike for political status at the end of 1980, he urged Mrs Thatcher to make minor but symbolic concessions. She refused, and their meeting ended with an enraged Hume telling the prime minister what he thought of her, and (in his own words) “being thrown out”.

The death of Frank Maguire, the nationalist MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, triggered a by-election with public feeling over the hunger strike at its height. Bobby Sands won it from his prison hospital bed, unopposed by the SDLP. After Sands died, Hume refused to field a candidate against Sinn Fein’s Owen Carron, who won but declined to take his seat.

In 1983 Hume won the new Commons seat of Foyle, having campaigned for EEC funds to build a £25 million bridge across that river. Over the next decade he built his support from just under to just over half the voters, at the expense of both Sinn Fein and the Unionists.

In his maiden speech, Hume claimed that Britain had withdrawn psychologically from Northern Ireland and should turn this into a “political reality”. But he was frustrated by the slow pace of advance.

He resented Mrs Thatcher’s dismissal of his New Ireland Forum, but accorded her some credit for accepting the Agreement despite the misgivings of many close to her. Yet over time the Agreement proved an obstacle rather than a step toward a settlement, and the catalyst was as much the secret British contacts with the Provisionals as Hume’s own discussions with Adams.

When after three years of apparent progress the IRA bombed South Quay at Canary Wharf, Hume’s reaction was: “It’s over”; his own credibility seemed in pieces, and gains by Sinn Fein in elections soon after seemed to confirm this. With Adams, he pressed Major for further concessions, but it took the election in 1997 of a Labour government not dependent on Unionist votes in the Commons for the pace to quicken.

Hume toyed that autumn with running for the presidency of the Republic, but six months later the Good Friday Agreement was concluded; in his view the “real healing process” could now begin. In December 1998 he and Trimble were confirmed as winners of the Nobel Prize.

Dogged by ill health, Hume gave up his leadership of the SDLP in 2001, left the European Parliament in 2004 and the next year stood down from the Commons and the Northern Ireland Assembly, then in abeyance after the IRA had been found using Sinn Fein’s office at Stormont to track potential targets. By the time power-sharing resumed under the improbable leadership of Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, Hume, and the SDLP, were on the sidelines.

From 2002 to 2010 Hume was Tip O’Neill Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Ulster; he was then made an honorary professor. He received a papal knighthood in 2012.

John Hume married Patricia Hone in 1960; they had two sons and three daughters.

John Hume, born January 18 1937, died August 3 2020