John Hume
John Hume was the principal architect of the Good Friday Agreement and shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for it. Born in Derry in 1937 to a Catholic family in a city where the electoral boundaries were drawn so that a unionist minority controlled the council, he was the first of his family to receive a secondary education, under a 1947 act that opened grammar schools. He trained for the priesthood at Maynooth, left, and became a schoolteacher. He helped found the Derry Credit Union in 1960 and a housing association, working on the material grievances — jobs and housing allocation — that underlay the conflict. He was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1968, which demanded one person one vote and an end to discrimination, and was on the streets on Bloody Sunday in 1972 when soldiers killed thirteen unarmed marchers. He was elected to Stormont in 1969, co-founded the Social Democratic and Labour Party in 1970, and led it from 1979, while also sitting in the European Parliament and at Westminster. He held to constitutional nationalism absolutely, opposing the IRA campaign while insisting that no settlement could work without republicans in it. He internationalised the question, building support among Irish-American politicians including Ted Kennedy and later Bill Clinton. His riskiest act was talking to Gerry Adams from 1988, secretly and then publicly. He was condemned across the political spectrum for legitimising the IRA, and it cost his party support permanently, but the Hume-Adams dialogue produced the ceasefires of 1994 and the process that led to the 1998 agreement. He shared the Nobel Prize with David Trimble. He had dementia in his final years and died in 2020.
- Lived: 1937 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: politician
