One fine day some students in this community announced that they were going to hold sit-downs and occupy public buildings. The Government react immediately like frightened rabbits and decide to make them illegal without giving any real or due consideration to what they are doing. What they have done is that they have refused to listen to grievances aired in Parliament and have left a large section of the community with very little faith in Parliament or in parliamentary democracy by refusing to listen to grievances.12
Fearing the growth of the IRA, Hume urged Unionist MPs to understand that, when the rule of law falls into disrepute, then people will feel that ‘they have a duty to break that law’.13 How, when such pleas were consistently ignored, did Hume respond? When rational argument failed, Hume, along with Ivan Cooper and Paddy Devlin – future co-founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party – and others, would occasionally take over the floor in the middle of the House and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, thereby replicating in parliament the modality of protest that existed on the street. In addition, this ongoing dialogue of the deaf in Stormont naturally elicited from Hume and his colleagues the obstructionism tactic that Parnell and his party had practised in Westminster a century earlier. (Parnell remained a central influence on Hume throughout his political life: shortly after being elected to Westminster, when he discovered that there was no recognition of Charles Stewart Parnell in the Houses of Parliament, he sought donations from MPs to ensure that a bust of Parnell was sculpted, which was placed close to Committee Room 15, where Parnell’s party had split.) Throughout his time in Stormont, Hume’s unqualified belief in parliamentary politics remained steadfast: his eagerness to put an argument on the record in Hansard, even when its practical impact seemed elusive, indicates not only a respect for parliamentary politics, but also a sharp sense of history.
Hume was later to say in Westminster that the central problem of the British having created in Northern Ireland a system based on a sectarian headcount was that ‘When one tells the majority that it can protect itself only by remaining in majority, one invites it to maintain sectarian solidarity as the only means of protection. Therefore, one makes sectarianism the motive force of politics.’14
That deeply rooted fault line of the Northern Irish State, since it was created through partition, vitiated any realistic prospect of reform from within: a perception that Hume was to reluctantly accept after the possibilities of reform from within had been exhausted. Power in Northern Ireland was so perniciously enmeshed with religious justifications for its possession that its holders had comprehensively absorbed the myth of their own entitlement. From the opposition benches Hume faced not merely political intransigence but a deeply tribal confederacy whose identity depended on not admitting any modification to the Orange State.
Membership of the Orange Order (and of the Freemasons) was almost a prerequisite for Unionist MPs. Therefore, for Unionist MPs the breaking with the orthodoxy of banning civil rights marches would have had the consequence of losing caste within their own community. If their pretext for banning civil rights marches was that they posed a risk to public security, Hume asked how (given that they identified as Orangemen) those MPs could possibly be called on to ban an Orange march, when there were grounds to believe it would equally threaten the peace? He put it to them that when members ‘have so much regalia around their necks the flow of blood to the brain is affected’.15 Under threat of a form of excommunication, the Orangemen and Masons who ran the Unionist parliament sustained its sectarian character. The effect of this tribal clustering was to block the possibility of compromise; it was a design which ensured sufficient Unionist solidarity in parliament so the majority could always prevail, but at the cost of perpetuating division within the society at large. The Ulster Unionist Party’s operation at the Parliament of Northern Ireland was like a wall prescribing clear positions: those hidden behind the wall were unable and unwilling to hear any form of opposition; those who were banished to live outside the wall, and who launched attempts to be included, were all but foredoomed.
In contrast to the bowler-hatted insularity of Unionist MPs, Hume continued to add growth rings of internationalism to his perspectives. In the following quotation (ironic given the support he later received from President Reagan), Hume traces a repressive measure in then Governor Reagan’s California through to Stormont’s legislative measures intended to contain non-violent protest. The connection between the Sacramento and Belfast administrations reveals the power of mass media as well as the butterfly effect of both civil disobedience and measures to contain it:
At the end of November last a local newspaper contained an article indicating that Governor Ronald Reagan intended that it should be an offence in California to sit, kneel or lie down on a road. The wording of this provision is rather peculiar. Who dreamt it up? It does not exist in many laws elsewhere. We must assume that someone read this newspaper report. The paper went further and referred to one of its favourite themes‚ the rebelliousness of modern youth, particularly the grant-aided miscreants of Queen’s University, and commended the proposed Californian measure to this Parliament.16
Yet the Unionist Party continued to ban marches and stymie reform. In one instance, when Prime Minister Brian Faulkner removed protesters’ barricades, Hume said angrily in an improvised interview in Derry: ‘If Faulkner thinks that the taking down of the barricades here today means that the people of this area have withdrawn their opposition to the regime, then of course he is being very deluded.’ When hope of effecting change through their political representatives, through demonstrations or sit-in protests diminished, Hume warned that then some people would embrace hopeless methods out of frustration. Hume was to give this message to senior American politicians when he began his process of educating them about the origins of the IRA, and as an MP in the Parliament of Northern Ireland he conveyed the same point. In one of the great counterfactual propositions of twentieth-century Irish history, the question raised by Hume – how could political leadership have contained the anger of the minority by making basic concessions and allowing their voice to be heard – still rings down the years:
A large section of this community are a permanent political minority and over a long period of time they have felt that they have no part in the decision-making process. This causes frustration and the frustration is all the greater when those same people know that their elected representatives are not being listened to … What does a person do then? He turns to another method of drawing attention to grievances, and in any democratic society these methods should be left open. The people then go on to the streets in the mass demonstration … It has been quite clear that this is a method of protest which is not permitted for long in this community … The third or final method of protest is the protest whereby a person draws attention to his problems by sitting or kneeling down in a public place. Now that is to be wiped out. Surely any intelligent person judging this situation would see that, when one systematically removes all means whereby people can air their grievances democratically, one thereby creates an explosive situation … militancy can only be strengthened by such intransigence.17
Here, Hume attempts to expose the connection between incitement to hatred and acts of violence on the street and, as a corollary, to impugn the actions of Ian Paisley, who was to cloak himself in violent rhetoric for the duration of his political career until the peace process in the 1990s. Hume identifies the ways in which extreme Loyalists and Republicans became objective allies in word and deed:
Nothing at all is to be gained from extreme speeches. It is worth pointing out that when one takes up an extreme position in politics one depends upon extreme opponents, on the development of extremism for one’s survival … The victory of the policies and politics of people like the hon. Member for Bann Side [Ian Paisley] depend on a break-down of law and order. If law and order do not break down they are defeated and shown to be wrong.18
As both a preacher and politician, Paisley had, even in the 1960s, perfected the dual approach of rallying people by infusing theology in politics, which meant that when