Mary Pat Kelly writes about her friendship with politician and peacemaker, John Hume
“Mr. Hume says Northern Ireland is simply too complicated to cut back to a Yes/No proposition,” Ted Smyth said to me. Fall 1976. I’m an Associate Producer at Good Morning America and Ted’s the Press Secretary for the Irish Embassy. We didn’t realize how young we were – Ted wasn’t 30; I used to be 31 and John Hume hadn’t turned 40.
“But,” I said, “this might be his probability to succeed in hundreds of thousands of Americans who’ve never heard of him. Tell him we just beat the Today Show in rankings.”
Ted had pitched John Hume to me because the leader of the Martin Luther King-inspired Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland — the voice of Irish constitutional nationalism. Like most Irish Americans I used to be sympathetic to the Catholics of the North, had been horrified by Bloody Sunday, and hoped for a united Ireland but hesitated to support the violence of an armed struggle. Here was another.
I used to be sold.
My bosses weren’t. Moderation didn’t make good television. We were originally of the “if it bleeds it leads era.”
But I had my very own segment on the show called Face-Off, a each day debate where two opposing partisans could go at one another. And, yes, I could book John Hume for that.
“I’ll make the questions generic,” I told Ted. “He can just state his opinions and ignore his opponent.“
But Mr. Hume was not interested.
“You’re the one politician I’ve encountered who puts principles first,” I said to John Hume that night. Ted had taken us to dinner at Cantina, a preferred Mexican restaurant on the Upper West Side. My Mom was visiting from Chicago and got here along.
John began to put out the ideas that will ultimately bring peace not simply to Northern Ireland but, as he said, “Take the gun out of Irish politics for the primary time in 800 years.”
All conflict is about difference
Yet the difference is the essence of humanity – an accident of birth. Respect for difference should be the premise for a just and productive society.
I didn’t take all of it in or understand it completely. But one thing was very clear. As a commentator said in the course of the funeral, John Hume was good company. Not that he was a charmer and positively not a back slapper but he was so alive. His brain whirred right in front of you spitting out a nuanced historical evaluation or the lyrics of a song. That night he sang, Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina earning us a free round of Margaritas. Evita had not been produced yet however the album was out and Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina was #1 on the UK hit parade.
“And as for fortune and as for fame/ I never invited them in.” John sang.
“They’re illusions/They usually are not the solutions they promised to be/The reply was here on a regular basis/I like you and hope you like me.”
Prescient. Fame and fortune would never be essential to John Hume. He would develop into the one person in history to be awarded all three peace prizes – the Nobel, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi. Large sums were connected to those awards. He donated the cash to charity – half to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and half to the Salvation Army to serve the needs of each communities. “I don’t see these as personal recognition but as gestures of support to all of the people of Northern Ireland,” he would say.
For John Hume, the reply was at all times within the people. He loved them and they’d love him. Though I don’t think he would have put it so sentimentally. Still The Town I Loved So Well was his party piece.
He didn’t must develop into involved in other people’s problems. Each he and his wife, Pat, had succeeded against the chances. As a part of the primary generation of Catholics in Northern Ireland to profit from free university education, they became teachers and could lead on a cushty life with mental satisfactions. John won a visit to Paris as a French teacher and his Master’s thesis formed the premise of Leon Uris’ research for Trinity. Pat was revered by her pupils. They’d began a family.
But, as Michelle Obama wrote about Barack Obama, “It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place. It was one other thing entirely to get the place unstuck.” She got here to this realization as Barack Obama spoke to women within the basement of a church, a part of a consortium of Catholic parishes that hired him to come back to Chicago as a community organizer to implement Catholic social justice teachings on the town’s impoverished South Side
Many years before it was a Catholic Social Motion Retreat that had inspired the Humes to “unstick their place.” Establishing a Credit Union seemed a direct method to help those kept poor by an unjust system that denied them jobs, housing and even the best to vote.
John had seen his mother and aunts borrowing from moneylenders at outrageous rates of interest. He would at all times say that establishing the Derry Credit Union and becoming President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27 was his proudest achievement.
During her funeral commentary, Mary McAleese told how as a 13-year-old she heard John tell a gathering in her Ardoyne Parish Hall that by putting together their pennies and ha pennies’ they may achieve real power. “A light-weight bulb went off,” she said.
I left Good Morning, America for Saturday Night Live and was in a Ph.D. program specializing in Irish Studies.
I used to be delighted when in June 1979 John Hume was elected to the European Parliament.
That fall I went to Ireland with my Dad for 3 weeks after which settled in to research my dissertation –The Sovereign Woman: Her Image within the Literature of Ireland. Within the Royal Irish Academy, I examined the 14th-century manuscript Book of the O’Kelly and discovered the Banshenchas, an outline of distinguished Irish women down through the centuries. Here were the Brehon poets and judges of ancient Ireland; the abbesses and queens. History and myths mingled together, enriching one another.
Was Queen Maeve an actual person? Well, she got here from somewhere.
Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen, definitely existed. I met one in every of her descendants who was modest about her spectacular ancestor. “When you are brave in a ship, they make up great stories about you.”
During that trip, I got to spend time with Pat Hume – comfortable the one that can write those words! I won’t wax poetic because she wouldn’t prefer it, but discuss ‘brave in a ship.’ Open up the Banshenchas and let her in!
In 1984 I managed to get an project from Rolling Stone Magazine to cover President Reagan’s visit to Ireland and John’s campaign for reelection to the European Parliament. I arrived in Derry in time to hitch the ladies of the SDLP Bogside Branch on a Sunday afternoon canvass. Margaret Doherty, her sister Anna, Kathleen Gallagher, Berna McIver, Teesie and Joanna clicking up those cobblestone streets of their high heels with Pat Hume keeping everyone’s spirits up. They knocked on door after door, bantering with those that opposed them. But these were the times of “armored cars and bombed-out bars” and that night the SDLP Headquarters was firebombed. This non-violent party faced attacks from each unionist and republican extremists. Mo Hume, Pat and John’s young daughter, then 10 years old, and I needed to dodge a barrage of stone while walking through the Creggan.
“Aren’t you very afraid to live in Latest York?” she asked me.
Rolling Stone didn’t want the finished article. Moderation doesn’t sell magazines.
But my friends from Chicago days, Peter and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels ran the piece in Commonweal.
I took the article to WTTW – the PBS Station in Chicago. Would they be concerned about collaborating on a documentary that showed a special view of Northern Ireland?
The station manager interrupted me, “It’s not news to say that one million people didn’t riot last night,” he said.
“It’s should you assume they’ll be rioting,” I answered. “If I make the film myself, will you take a look at it and consider broadcasting it?”
“Okay,” he said.
I started my research by attending the SDLP Convention in November 1984. John Hume, had now been elected to each the British and European parliaments. He had orchestrated a yr of meetings in Dublin called The Latest Ireland Forum which had produced a consensus among the many nationalist parties.
Three possible models of an inclusive government in Northern Ireland were presented to Margaret Thatcher. She replied with what became often known as the “Out Out Out Speech.” Depressing. I didn’t know what to anticipate when John Hume stood as much as speak to his party members. He didn’t say a word but began singing “I wandered today through the hills, Maggie.” Everybody laughed and by the top, all of them sang together, “But to me, you’re as fair as you were, Maggie, once you and I were young.”
These people is not going to be defeated I assumed.
I had a cameraman friend, frequent flyer miles, and a few money from writing screenplays in Hollywood and got down to cover the May 1985 local elections which might test SDLP support. Sinn Féin was contesting the elections for the primary time. Commentators were predicting the extremists would win. However the election results were excellent news for the SDLP. They took an amazing variety of seats on the Derry City Council.
Afterward, I used to be capable of spend time in John’s constituency office where Pat Hume kept an open-door policy, solving problems that ranged from an emergency coal delivery for a senior citizen to monitoring the arrest of an unjustly accused young man. Lunch times were my favorite. John Tierney, Lord Mayor of Derry, John Hume’s young research assistant, Mark Durkan, and Pat’s assistant Jackie Green were the regulars. Often John’s sister, Agnes, Councillor Jim Clifford, and Stan, an older man who had served within the British Army, would gather for conversation and sandwiches. The craic was at all times great!
The toughest a part of filming the documentary was getting John Hume to sit down down for an interview. He wasn’t available in the course of the election campaign. Finally, I managed an hour with him in Latest York City. And he gave me the title of the film, “To Live For Ireland”
“For too long Irish patriotism meant dying for Ireland. I need our young people to live for Ireland! To shed their sweat, not their blood,” John said.
That was his message to Irish America. Don’t romanticize martyrdom. Don’t glorify violence. Help us create a Latest Ireland.
PBS Broadcast “To Live For Ireland”. Good reviews. Awards. Though a newspaper reporter friend said to me, “I don’t know, Mary Pat, you’ve got a whole lot of little kids in there and no political scientists.”
But it surely was the kids that made my mother cry. How can anyone put those lives in danger? she wondered. After I ran out of cash she gave me the funds to complete the documentary. I made her the Executive Producer.
But one thing was annoying. At screenings, someone would see shots of the Sperrin Mountains, the beach at Downhill, or the River Foyle and say, “But that may’t be Northern Ireland!” It was as if a cloak of invisibility smothered this a part of the island of Ireland turning it right into a desolate wasteland of media images. A spot of bombs and bullets and folks steeped in bigotry.
By this time Irish America magazine had been founded. Editor, Patricia Harty, assigned me the interview with Ian Henderson, the top of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board when he got here to Latest York City. I discovered he was a military historian specializing within the American presence in Northern Ireland during WWII.
What??
YES – 300,000 American servicemen were stationed in Northern Ireland.
Here was an awesome, largely unknown, story that will interest all Americans. And it was 1991, the start of the 50th anniversary of WWII. Northern Ireland – away from the troubles; the people the scenery; the hospitality. “Home Away From Home: The Yanks in Ireland” premiered on PBS.
Phil Coulter wrote the theme song which has develop into a worldwide hit.
Derry was Base One Europe, the positioning of the most important U.S. Navy base in Europe. Five hundred Marines guarded the bottom. They were billeted on the grounds of the Beech Hill estate within the village of Ardmore, just outside the town. Now as Beech Hill Country House Hotel, it was John Hume’s go-to place for the politicians and business individuals who were coming to Derry to assist transform the town and Northern Ireland. Teddy Kennedy had his own room within the hotel.
Then in 1997, the Marines began arriving, comfortable to reconnect with this a part of their heritage. Patsy O’Kane, the owner of Beech Hill, hosted an annual event with as many as 100 Marines in attendance and turnout of local people. Annually the Paddy Hone Award, named for Pat Hume’s father, a revered resident of Ardmore, was presented. John Hume delighted in these occasions.
Here was a probability for John to reconnect with a formative a part of his childhood. As a six-year-old in the course of the war years, he learned to play baseball from the Marines. Tipped them off as to which dog would win on the illegal greyhound track (“I‘d watch to see which dog would get a jag from Dr. Iodine.”) and enjoyed the sweets that rationing had taken away. But more importantly, he remembered a gaggle of individuals for whom religion was not the badge of difference who hired Catholic men to work on the bottom and gave each his father and Pat’s father one of the best job of their lives.
I’d prefer to imagine that a Marine gave young John a penny and explained “E Pluribus Unum – From Many We Are One.” John Hume would often say this was the concept upon which he based his philosophy for peace.
Lt. Gen. Martin Berndt, and Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Carlton Kent made quite a few trips to Derry and formed a friendship with John.
“Nobody wants peace greater than a soldier who has been in battle,” Martin Berndt told John. And Sgt. Maj. Kent appreciated the connections between the US Civil Rights Movement and the one which John led in Northern Ireland.
“As soon as I met John I knew he was the style of person with great character and a servant leader. He spoke with us concerning the importance of acceptance and variety and concerning the positive impact the Marines had on him when he lived near the camp and enjoyed his time with the Marines as a toddler,” Carlton Kent recalled.
It’s October 1998. The Good Friday Agreement is in effect. Peace is already changing people’s lives. My mom, her best friend since childhood, Nancy, and I are visiting Derry. John and Pat take us out to dinner on what is going to develop into the night before the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize are announced. As we drive to the restaurant in Donegal, Pat points out the place where Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell sailed from Ireland within the Flight of the Earls.
The winner really is a secret. Nobody knows. And nobody wants to discuss what possibly could possibly be. We’re all tense.
Then my mother’s friend Nancy raises her glass. “Here’s to you understand what.” We laugh. Start talking. John sings “Danny Boy.” The following morning Pat will see a “V” of untamed geese within the sky. The announcement comes John Hume and David Trimble win the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize.
My County Tyrone husband, Martin Sheerin, and I watched John‘s funeral broadcast with my mother who’s now 99. That lovely ceremony, so stuffed with the spirit of Pat Hume.
I remembered filming “To Live For Ireland” and 11-year-old Anthony Carlin who helped across the office went canvassing, and handed out election literature.
“Why do you support the SDLP?” I asked him. I suppose I expected something about bringing peace. As an alternative, he said, “Well they’re kind. They take you around places. They’re laugh.”
Yes.
Goodbye, John. Thanks!
Read Mary Pat Kelly’s piece on Pat Hume, Remembering Pat Hume or return to the John Hume tribute page.
Mary Pat Kelly’s celebrated historical fiction series, the bestseller Galway Bay, Of Irish Blood and now Irish Above All tells the Irish American story through her family’s saga. https://marypatkelly.