50 Facts About John Hume

John Hume was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

John Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie", a seamstress, and Samuel John Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker.

John Hume had a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal.

John Hume was among the first to benefit from the 1947 Education Act.

John Hume did not complete his clerical studies but graduated in 1958 with a degree in French and history.

In 1960, aged 23, John Hume helped establish the Derry Credit Union, the first cooperative community bank in Northern Ireland.

Such was the success of this exercise in what he represented as "practical Christianity", that within four years John Hume had become the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions, a role in which he served until 1968.

John Hume was later to remark that of all the things he contributed to in his life, he was proudest of his engagement with credit unions, no movement having done "more good for the people of Ireland, north and south".

In 1963, drawing on his Maynooth thesis research, John Hume wrote a script for a television documentary on Derry, "A City Solitary", that was broadcast on both the BBC and RTE.

John Hume had refused an invitation to set up a NICRA branch in his home city.

John Hume was wary of the association's infiltration by left-wing activists such as Derry socialist Eamon McCann.

John Hume, elected vice-chair of a new Citizens' Action Committee, called for a sit-down protest at the Guildhall two weeks later.

Notwithstanding their contest, six months later, on 12 August 1969, John Hume linked arms with McAteer in an attempt to hold back his constituents in a further confrontation with the police, recalled as the Battle of the Bogside.

In June 1970, John Hume had broken with others in the group in supporting Eddie McAteer, as the Westminster challenger to the Unionist for Londonderry.

John Hume had been meeting with McAteer's Nationalists and with Gerry Quigley's National Democratic Party, and was pulled back to the Stormont group only when they announced that they were going ahead with a new party under the leadership of Fitt.

John Hume proposed that it be called the "Social Democratic Party", but Fitt and Devlin had insisted that without "Labour" in its title, the party would not be acceptable to their working-class voters in Belfast.

In June 1971, while he appeared to join his colleagues in responding positively to the offer of Prime Minister Brian Faulkner to more fully engage them in parliament through committees, John Hume suggested to party activists that it was time to consider scrapping the Government of Ireland Act 1920.

John Hume compared the killings to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.

John Hume highlighted the agreement's return to an original feature of the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the Council of Ireland.

John Hume described the cross border ministerial and parliamentary forum as "a continuing conference table" at which "Catholic, Protestant, Planter and Gael" could explore the bases for unity.

John Hume recalls all other considerations being overridden by the drive to get Council established in the hope of producing "the dynamic that would lead ultimately to an agreed united Ireland".

John Hume continued to insist that the executive might have survived had Rees taken a tougher stand.

John Hume allowed that "insofar as it shows a determination to avoid sectarian conditioning", integrated schools were to be "welcomed".

In defending the Sunningdale agreement, John Hume suggested that it had been "purely on the basis of [their] agreed economic and social policies that members of the executive had come together", and that to consider the case for state intervention, worker democracy and a radical approach to poverty they would do so again.

In June 1979, John Hume was elected as one of Northern Ireland's three Members of the European Parliament.

John Hume was to hold his seat in Strasbourg for five terms, until his retirement in 2004.

John Hume joined the Socialist Group in the Parliament, and for almost all his time as an MEP was a member of the group's bureau.

In Europe, John Hume found sufficient evidence that a "divided society [need not] be a violent one".

John Hume cited the accommodations between French and Flemish speakers in Belgium; between Madrid and Catalonia in Spain; and between Catholics, Protestants and Socialists in the Netherlands, arguing:.

John Hume saw the then European Community as, itself, an example of reconciliation through the construction of shared political and social institutions.

John Hume saw the European project as an opportunity for representatives of the rival domestic traditions to cooperate in a context free of local prejudices and history.

John Hume cautioned those contributing to NORAID that they were supporting a "vicious parody" of Irish republicanism that, as first set forth by the United Irishmen, properly rests on the "brotherhood" of Catholic and Protestant.

When in March 1981, Sinn Fein put forward PIRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands as the Anti H-Block candidate for a Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, John Hume prevented his party colleague, Austin Currie, from entering the contest.

In what he regarded as "a no-win situation", John Hume deferred to Sinn Fein's nominated successor for the seat, Owen Carron, when a month after his election Sands died.

John Hume again tackled Adams on the central premises of the PIRA campaign.

John Hume proposed that if he were "to lead a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland today", it would be against the IRA.

John Hume's leader had spent so much time and effort cultivating ties in Washington, New York and Boston because, with Britain reluctant to challenge the unionist veto, "the only place from where that pressure could come was from the US".

At a meeting in London, John Hume, according to their host, Irish Ambassador Noel Dorr, proposed that "the concept of [Irish] unity is more important as a factor in what he called 'the tribal conflict' than in itself".

Over British objections, in January 1994 President Clinton allowed Adams to make the journey John Hume had been taking since the 1970s.

John Hume helped get around this by proposing an international body on arms decommissioning to be headed by President Clinton's envoy to the peace process, Senator George Mitchell.

John Hume has been the only person to combine the Nobel Peace Prize with two other major international peace awards, the Martin Luther Award and the Gandhi Peace Prize.

In 2010, John Hume topped a viewer poll by the Irish national broadcaster RTE as "Ireland's Greatest" ahead of Michael Collins, Mary Robinson, James Connolly, and Bono.

On 4 February 2004, John Hume announced his complete retirement from politics and was succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader.

John Hume did not contest the 2004 European election, nor did he run in the 2005 general election, in which Mark Durkan retained the Foyle constituency for the SDLP.

John Hume was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations.

John Hume held the position of Club President of his local football team, Derry City FC, which he supported all his life.

John Hume was a patron of the children's charity Plan International Ireland.

In 1960, John Hume married Patricia "Pat" Hone, a primary school teacher, whom he had first met two years earlier at a dancehall in Muff, County Donegal.

In 2015, John Hume was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s.

John Hume died in the early hours of 3 August 2020 at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83.