TWO REAL ACHIEVEMENTS
I have not read all the tributes that have been made to John Hume since his death earlier this year, but I doubt if many - perhaps any - of them have got to the heart of his real achievement. Which was two-fold. On the one hand he prevented a settlement of Northern Ireland's constitutional status that seemed to be a real possibility in the late seventies and early eighties on what might have been called 'Unionist' principles (though it could have resulted in the end, or radical decline, of 'Unionism' as a force in Northern Ireland politics). On the other hand, along with Gerry Adams, Charles Haughey and Father Alec Reid of the Clonard monastery in Belfast, he found a means by which the IRA could lay down its arms without the appearance of having been defeated - an appearance of defeat that would have had very damaging consequences for the cultural and political coherence of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.
It needs to be said straightaway that the IRA were not defeated. Their achievement in maintaining the war and driving their enemies - the British army, with all the resources, both overt and covert, it possessed, together with the array of Ulster Protestant paramilitary forces - to a stalemate is very impressive. Pat Walsh, in Resurgence, his remarkable study of the resurgence of the Catholic community starting in the 1960s, suggests that, even as early as the late 1970s, elements in the IRA leadership had recognised that they could not 'win', if by winning was meant securing a united Ireland. (1) But by that time so much energy, skill and determination had been invested in the campaign that it had become the emblem of Catholic - especially Catholic working class - resolve never to return to the near fifty years of humiliation they had suffered since the Westminster government imposed a separate, necessarily Protestant dominated, government on them. An appearance of defeat would have had a severely demoralising effect on the community as a whole, the more so because so many young people were joining (with all the dangers - and excitement - that that implied), not because of any great longing for a united Ireland, but simply out of outrage at the presence of army soldiers in their streets and army helicopters in their skies.
(1) Pat Walsh: Catastrophe and Resurgence - the Catholic predicament in Northern Ireland, Volume 2, Resurgence, 1969-2016, Belfast Historical and Educational Society, 2016, p.287: 'In 1977 Jimmy Drumm dropped a bombshell at Bodenstown when he gave formal recognition that the war was not being won by the Provos ... There was little doubt that the Army Council had countenanced the Bodenstown Address and it had fundamental consequences for the War. From then on the problem was how to end the war in a functional settlement. If the British Government did not facilitate an ending of the War on reasonable terms, it would undoubtedly have to be prolonged until it did, and it would have to be enhanced with politics to make up for the declining military position.'