When he began his political career almost 40 years ago, it was a time of hope. The civil rights movement seemed to open up a new way forward for the North’s Catholics, a way free from violence. But all too soon that hope was shattered by the worst violence that Northern Ireland had ever seen. It was engulfed for 30 years by political and sectarian killing. A whole generation was raised to the crack of gunfire and the blast of bombs. At times, despair overwhelmed those who believed that it was still possible to resolve the conflict with peaceful means.
Two photographs frame Hume’s career. The first shows him as he stood, his back to the wall, drenched by a British army water canon during a civil rights march. A quarter of a century later, the second captures an unforgettable scene as Hume embraces the distraught relatives of the victims of the Greysteele massacre on Halloween 1993, when seven died in a revenge attack for the Shankill Road bomb attack. At that point, coming in the wake of what seemed like a possible breakthrough with the earliest beginnings of the peace process, it appeared that he was on the verge of a breakdown. But he survived it, stayed engaged with republicans, and remained so, until the peace process became a fact of life.
Hume spent his life trying to dispel the illusions of others — the most dangerous of which was that violence would bring about a solution to the North’s deep divisions. He knew, and history has borne him out, that it only served to deepen those divisions. It will be a long time before they will be healed. But it is partly thanks to the tenacity of his own vision that the task can now be undertaken.
It was his achievement to prove that his vision of peace was not an illusion. He did so by helping to make it a reality.