COMMENT: ‘You must be like little children’ - in memory of John Hume

Something struck me while mourning the loss of John Hume in August. It had always been a mystery to me why John Hume had such a large working-class support base in Derry when the SDLP’s support base was mainly middle-class outside our city.

A possible answer occurred to me recently when I was reading an article about the new John and Pat Hume Foundation where former SDLP Stormont minister Professor Sean Farren, Chairperson, said: “This Foundation has been established because we believe that the values and ideals of partnership, reconciliation, inclusion and social justice that John and Pat embraced throughout their lives can help support our young people to navigate the profound challenges of their time and inspire the next generation of peace-makers.”

The Professor put it well, but in complex language. John Hume’s language was not that particularly complex.

Notwithstanding that, it seemed to me that that was the secret of John Hume. He was talking about fairly simple matters that appealed to people across the political and class divide.

They particularly appealed to working-class Catholics in Derry. Why? Because that was where he grew up. That is where he learned about dealing with other people, where he learned to respect people even if they had virtually nothing in terms of their personal wealth. The reality was that these values and ideals were central to his childhood.

What were “the values and ideals of partnership” would have been understood in John Hume’s childhood community as “friendship”, as good-natured working-class children had in abundance in their daily lives. Friendship cost nothing; enmity was present but rare and it didn’t flourish in John Hume’s community because it made no sense.

“Reconciliation” was saying “sorry” for ordinary people. There was little more to it than that. Everybody was reconciled in an impoverished community where your list of friends was relatively fixed and where there were no prima donnas. Children fell out but that didn’t last very long. Children came back into the fold; they didn’t have to say anything, but everyone knew that they were saying “sorry”.

“Inclusion” was making sure that everybody got to play the games they wanted to play and nobody was left out. That’s what good-natured children do. The parents of some children could afford clothes for their children’s First Communion and Confirmation, others got them second hand. No-one was aggrieved, no-one asserted any superiority. All were included.

“Social justice” was central to the lives of ordinary children but it might have been expressed as “fairness” that would ensure that nobody was hurt or made to do something they didn’t want to do. Older children took care of younger members of their families and ensured that they were protected from any bullies and from other dangers. Older children were expected to have a sense of responsibility that meant that younger children could play freely, unencumbered by any threat to their freedom or innocence.

So the qualities John Hume embraced were – mostly unconsciously – inculcated in him from his early life. They were part of who he was and they never changed.

Yet the most important quality John Hume had, an attribute which would have developed in his childhood too, and stayed there despite many trials in his political career, was his personal happiness. He was a happy man. And we must never forget that aspect of the man.

Happiness propelled him in to helping other people in his community. Happiness made him help the people he grew up with who, in his own words, “hadn’t been as fortunate in life as I had been”. He studied in Maynooth among many like-minded future Catholic clergy. He came back to Derry when he decided on a slightly different course of action but, with Hume, there is always a sense of being called to do what he did.

John Hume had a knack of knowing how to keep himself happy. That was quite a quality and a by-product of a childhood where happiness was the only reward for good-natured children.

Maynooth wasn’t enough for him, so he moved away from that option. It didn’t allow him to change the things he wanted to change in his community. The world was changing when he came to that conclusion. The expectation of people from poorer backgrounds was that they could now change society through doing well at school.

However, even with an education, and John Hume did well in education, his message was not solely or particularly directed at people who were as highly educated as him. I knew people in my childhood who had virtually no education, but who were quite capable of relating to all the things that John Hume was saying about the politics of the city and across the North.

Most Derry people knew what John Hume was saying. He was saying be happy, stay happy and keep unhappiness out of your lives. That wasn’t a shallow utterance but a challenge at the most profound, but unsaid, level; the happy understood, the unhappy didn’t. The happy knew what he meant as he talked to the human soul, “Don’t let these people destroy your happiness as they had destroyed their own.”

Most Derry people totally understood the non-violence and the power-sharing that he advocated as the direction in which the future of politics should evolve. They realised that these things derived from the values and ideals as expressed heretofore by former Stormont minister Professor Sean Farren – partnership, reconciliation, inclusion and social justice – or, as they might say themselves, friendship, saying sorry, ensuring that nobody was left out, and fairness.

Could this message that John Hume learned in his childhood before everything else, that appealed to all sections of society, from the poor to the well-off, from the young to the old, be what Jesus really meant when he said, “You must be like little children?”

*John O’Connell is the author of a number of books and a frequent commentator on politics.