A different kind of politics
Kelly, Mary Pat
I I I I I I I lulll I I I I I I I III I I I I JOHN & PAT HUME--LIVING FOR IRELAND A different kind of politics MARY PAT KELLY F OR ME THE STORY of John Hume's June 1984 campaign for reelection...
...She's been in Armagh prison for eight years, and has no idea when she'll get out...
...At Steeltown school a gang of young boys threw stones at the SDLP sound car...
...Yet here in Gallaigh a ten-year-old took a John Hume leaflet, tore it up in front of us, and spit on a forty-year-old woman who was probably a relative...
...The first self-help group that I started was inspired by my mother and her sisters...
...The habit of switching roles seems ingrained...
...Now for the first time since the 1920 civil war all the democratic parties that believe in Irish unity have gotten together in the New Ireland Forum...
...Does the f . . . ing mayor of New York have to go through this...
...The whole thing was education, getting yourself educated...
...Since no identification is required, and the polling cards, mailed to each registered voter, could be easily stolen or explained away, it was easy to do...
...And that those in the United States who think it's a simple problem of driving the British out of Ireland and then all will be well ought to realize: any solution that doesn't leave behind a peaceful Ireland isn't a solution at all.'" Soon after noon on Tuesday, June 18, John Hume was reelected to the European Parliament...
...The Lord Mayor has promised paint...
...I don't want the young people dying for Ireland, I want them to live for it...
...The election was finally over...
...he asked...
...Names needn't be given...
...She got huge bundles of shirts and would work all night...
...Handsome and humorous with a vivacious blonde wife and three angelicfaced children, Tierney is any local American political party's dream candidate...
...We're going to the public housing estates of Gallaigh, Shantallah, and Cairn Hill...
...He could also become a grave fifty if the occasion demanded...
...Over the past thirteen years, ICCR shareholder activities I I CAROL COSTON, O.P., was executive director of Network for eleven years...
...Pat Hume canvassed the Bogside that night...
...Again the older boys ripped them off...
...So I went to Europe and I delivered 63 million pounds for housing improvement for Belfast...
...Now the father is on the phone...
...I'll come back when I've done something for them...
...I was impressed -- impressed enough to follow Hume's career for the next seven years, including his 1981 election to a seat he still.holds in the British Parliament...
...The line of wooden chairs, filled by 9 A.M., does not empty until 7 P.M...
...Near Newtown Butler four boys approached a little girl and pulled the stickers off her shirt...
...When asked if she regrets their political involvement, she looks surprised...
...I was working for ABC's "Good Morning, America" and Hume had been invited to debate on the show...
...Later I learned the division wasn't absolute...
...And who is your neighbor...
...At one house we canvassed a little girl opened the door to 14 December 1984:679 reveal her young father vacuuming...
...At 6 P.M...
...And so it went...
...Fifteen years later we broke the Unionist power...
...Nobody's ever done anything for them...
...He was received good naturedly...
...In the civil rights movement I was myself beaten...
...Buy a heifer," said the auctioneer, "and we'll all vote for ye...
...or Catholic -- Cityside...
...That afternoon and evening we toured small villages and housing estates...
...I got involved in Self-Help...
...My pal was eighteen when she carried a bit of something for her boyfriend...
...This pays the rent, telephone, office expense, and small salaries to Pat Hume, Mark Durkan, and the secretary-receptionist...
...On meeting a widow: "Ah, but you had him for sixty-seven years...
...He was slightly embarrassed until Pat Hume said, "Wouldn't want to interrupt a Derry man working...
...I believe that one of the great opportunities of history was lost to really solve our problems by nonviolent methods...
...Morrison's campaign slogan was "One country, one people...
...They might attack him at 10 P.M...
...I had a very strong sense of spirituality and I felt it natural that I should be a priest...
...Where is he calling from now...
...When you're fifteen and sixteen," a twenty-six-year-old woman explained, "it seems excitin' to be for the Provos...
...Have you seen the new bridge over the Foyle...
...The crowd linked arms and joined in...
...But I don't raise mine just the same...
...Hume wanted to talk to them...
...How could he preside over the historic Guildhall and sit in "the Mayor's" parlor...
...Still, the competence and authority in Derry women is an impressive silver lining...
...when the polls closed...
...This little girl has survived a petrol bomb attack on her house, and daily has had to walk by graffiti that call her dad a traitor...
...It was the first such resolution sponsored.by a religious investor...
...Representatives from each party are allowed to ask election officials at the polling place to challenge a suspected voter...
...Thirteen years later, hundreds of similar resolutions have been filed by a wide variety of religious groups intent on acting responsibly in their investments...
...From the time her husband gave up his teaching post for politics in 1969 until his election to the European Parliament in 1979, her salary provided the family's main support...
...I wanted jobs and voting rights...
...What we need to do here is to devise a constitutional framework that allows people to be what they are and at the same time to work with one another...
...In the 1983 Westminister election," Pat Hume explained, "personation was a big problem...
...I say Ireland is a country to live for, not die for...
...Where is it...
...During the canvassing, a sense emerged for me of what division really means within that small Catholic community...
...I said to my colleague, I'm not going any further, I'm ashamed to ask these people for their vote...
...Last year we had stones thrown at us...
...He replied that the other candidates did have government protection, but that he refused it...
...He never worked again and he died in 1967...
...T HE THREAT of violence hung in the air on voting day...
...But Sinn Fein is busy there, and some of the wee feUas think throwing a stone's a great political act...
...I watched the people...
...But thea one of the young boys said to his friends, "Don't bully the wee girl...
...There's not many can say that...
...I had been told that John Hume was in Belfast and that his wife Pat ran his office in Derry...
...The tense game ended...
...I am so angry," she said...
...My mother was a well-known personality in the city...
...Today, these religious groups continue to focus public attention on corporate activities...
...T UESDAY, JUNE 12, I joined John Hume and his canvassing team for the day...
...But at 10:30 this election night, when summer darkness finally settled on the city, flashes of fire marked the explosions of petrol bombs...
...At 10 P.M...
...But even these achievements have proven less than satisfactory...
...On one level it was a children's game, on another, it was very ugly...
...But he kept encouraging me to break through...
...He laughs, and in that moment sanity returns...
...They have increased public attention on the activities of multiI N 1971, the Episcopal church filed a path-breaking shareholder resolution calling on General Motors to cease its operations in South Africa...
...I don't think she realizes how much I depend on her...
...Colum's College...
...My father would write letters for them to officialdom to get them their rights, their benefits...
...Sinn Fein, Sinn Fein," he responded...
...The women went over possible ways of protecting this mother-to-be's vote...
...In the early 1970s, a lack of formal policy objectives for alternative investments among investing religious groups resulted in a high instance of defaults...
...No, lassie, all Catholic...
...Her male companion told him if he challenged any more his brains would be blown out...
...I ' d be afraid to live in New York," she said...
...They had a system in Derry: when my mother wanted to buy clothes she would get a ticket . . . . But while she would get goods worth eight pounds she would pay back ten pounds - - two pounds interest...
...Even now there's no evidence of extra money in the way the family lives...
...Very old people on walkers shuffled past the guards...
...Religious investors have experienced frustration in dealing with corporate executives, and speeches given at annual meetings have often proven little more than symboiic exhortations...
...Paisley's: "Smash Sinn Fein, Reject Republicanism...
...But when ye see a mate killed or sent off to prison -- it's another thing again...
...What...
...But in the Center at this moment John Tierney is feeling the drawbacks of being a man'of the people...
...By midnight the violence ended...
...I'm against killing...
...Meanwhile Pat Hume is working on the case of the young man held in custody...
...Pat Hume acts as a power broker for the local poor...
...Of course," I said...
...has a constitution which accommodates differences that go far beyond anything in this country...
...Some Catholics lived south of the bridge -- waterside -- and there was a Protestant enclave cityside, but generally the Fayle River kept the two communities apart...
...I f you're committed to nonviolence," he said, "you must go all the way with it...
...But Hume's posters read: "Strength in Europe...
...We'll walk hand in hand, We'll walk hand in hand today...
...In both instances there is the sense of young men coming of age without the hope of a future...
...The SDLP headquarters, like the other shops in the vicinity, had plywood windows because of two separate arson attacks...
...She cooked a 2 A.M...
...Where can she reach him later...
...A Mass would be said for the repose of his soul if he challenged too many voters...
...Many of these religious investors belong to the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) which represents 17 Protestant denominations and 170 Catholic communities, predominantly women religious...
...What we in Ireland have to learn is that unity can only come by accepting diversity...
...My father was unemployed for twenty years...
...The issues of Northern Ireland were just too complicated to fit into a black-and-white, yes-or-no format, he explained...
...It had been worse the year before when army trucks had to escort poll watchers home...
...As her husband faced his greatest Commonweal: 680 political challenge, she continued to help people get delayed Social Security payments, fill out housing applications, obtain educational grants, and kept "monitoring" one young man's internment...
...meal for John Hume and six party workers, and was back in the office at 9 A.M...
...Well, she will call him there...
...by police and jailed under "Section 11" which allows for arrest and detention for seventy-two hours with no warrant or explanation...
...banner and not more Hume posters I was told, "The other side takes them down...
...The sufferers are the young people...
...companies...
...She would be at home all day with the family, and then at night when the family was in bed she'd do this to earn money...
...Most of the large cattle farms we passed were Protestant-owned...
...She is my life's blood...
...Good for the farmers...
...Now the crowd quieted...
...John Hume praised them for their support and called up to the stage those who had done particularly difficult jobs...
...John and Pat Hume arrived...
...The U.S...
...His staff consisted of a twenty-nineyear-old cousin who'd driven him throughout his entire 7,000 mile campaign through the North, and another relative, a man of twenty-five with an unending supply of jokes...
...You want Cityside or Waterside...
...I asked Hume whether the government provided candidates with some kind of security protection...
...From there we moved into housing . . . . "When the civil rights movement broke the voting system here I decided that the movement should be taken off the streets and into politics...
...Certainly the toll unemployment takes on the male sense of self-worth is deplorable...
...At the office, appointments aren't necessary...
...In 1984, discussions with management and filed resolutions cover issues from military contracts to minority economic development...
...He was from the Bogside, not highly educated, the kind of guy who in New York might work construction and play centerfield on the neighborhood bar's softball team...
...The nightmare of a son snatched away recedes, and hope reappears...
...Those were Unionist," the driver said...
...This cloud of violence hangs over the young women as well...
...For nearly 300 years this had been the turf of the Protestant elite...
...Her due date was June 14, and she was concerned that while she was in the hospital her vote might be stolen...
...SDLP posters routinely disappeared or were plastered over by Sinn Fein or the Unionists...
...She laughs...
...In Northern Ireland there is a tendency to fight every election on the same basic issue...
...At 9:45 P.M...
...We have lost through violence in Northern Ireland s billion that could have built a quarter of a million houses, twenty hospitals, and numberous factories...
...Sounds like a question from the catechism...
...Well, here's Pat now," the man said...
...It was raining...
...Sinn Fein is not made up of ogres, but of the cousins, nephews, and friends of the SLDP...
...The day after canvassing with Pat Hume, I joined her at the Advice Center she runs, and saw how much fierce courage a decision for sanity requires in war-tom Northern Ireland...
...Oh, are these Protestant areas...
...We're about to go canvassing...
...But I never believed in retaliation, because once you use a method of the person that you believe to be your enemy you reduce yourself to that level...
...He took office and after two days you'd think he was born the Lord Mayor of Derry...
...I ' m here to do a story on John Hume and the election...
...In Newbuildings housing estate, a stone hit...
...But based on two 1982 ICCR reports, denominations and religious orders now have developed policy statements and criteria for loan applicants 14 December 1984:683...
...The differences that exist aren't any deeper in fact than those that exist in many parts of the world...
...We have the highest degree of unemployment in Western Europe...
...Last June I went to Northern Ireland to observe the 1984 Europe Parliament election firsthand...
...At one house we canvassed a pregnant woman answered the door...
...but when I explained the brief, confrontational character of our TV "debate," Hume refused the invitation...
...But, Pat Hume explained, it is hard to know whom to challenge, and most of the time the challenged person would simply leave...
...Pause...
...Without any more preliminaries, we got in the car with three other women, veteran SDLP workers...
...At the Slievemore school the SDLP poll-watcher was given a black-rimmed Mass card with his name on it...
...I would like to see Pat Hume...
...Turned out to be pan of a weapon...
...You must be jokin...
...The solution is an accommodation of differences...
...I grew up in a very Catholic atmosphere...
...Sinn Fein posters often were removed by Paisleyites...
...Tierney managed to diffuse the situation enough to saunter to a car.waiting to take him to his office in the Guildhall...
...The young man was free...
...1 thought of thisas I walked with Maureen Hume, the Humes' ten-year-old daughter...
...He was then Deputy Leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) of Northern Ireland, a party formed by Catholic civil rights activists committed to creating a United Ireland through political and constitutional means...
...she said in the universal Derry greeting...
...It also became apparent to me that most of those seventeen and under in Derry do not remember a time before the troubles...
...Hume had led marches, sit-ins, and nonviolent demonstrations in his home city of Derry in the late sixties and early seventies to protest discrimination against Catholics in housing, employment, and voting rights...
...she asks...
...It sounds t o o . . , too sentimental...
...You see, there's this historic, romantic Irish thing that the only way that you can solve the Irish problem is by spilling blood, the sacrifice syndrome...
...She tells him that perhaps later that evening a visit might be arranged...
...Tragically, at the same time the IRA decided this was the time to strike...
...I'm against violence because it's us that suffer most from it...
...Then I could ask for their vote...
...I was dragged through the streets by British soldiers...
...Bombing doesn't provide jobs for them...
...The house next door...
...Basic corporate structures have remained unchanged, often with negative effects on the lives of workers, the environment, and third-world economic growth...
...John Hume was inside with the parish priest...
...Yet Tiemey had to be dragged into politics...
...How are ye...
...The civil rights movement had exposed the desperate injustices that Northern Ireland is built upon...
...But now one side is as bad as the other...
...Protestant -- Waterside...
...Bands of teenagers in ski masks with armorlite rifles were seen on Derry's city streets, and the army fired real bullets into a crowd...
...But I fight elections on what they are about...
...So I applied that principle to the community as a whole, and in 1960 we formed a credit department...
...His driver and aide waited...
...She has served on the Adrian Dominican Portfolio Board since 1975...
...Unfazed, she asked for more and replastered herself...
...Earlier in the evening John Hume had said to me, "Pat is an extraordinary person...
...But the threat of violence that hangs over Derry seems not unlike a New York subway when a group of menacing teenagers strides through the cars...
...Dozens of children raced along the cars shouting for the campaign stickers, plastering themselves front and back with green, red, and white circles...
...One woman who had delivered a premature baby two weeks before had left it in the hospital nursery to cast her ballot...
...I I I I I I I lulll I I I I I I I III I I I I JOHN & PAT HUME--LIVING FOR IRELAND A different kind of politics MARY PAT KELLY F OR ME THE STORY of John Hume's June 1984 campaign for reelection to the European Parliament for Northern Ireland began in 1977...
...John Hume took his wife's hand and began in a strong tenor voice, "We Shall Overcome...
...Someone see it sitting there like that they'll think it's a bomb...
...Just put what you observe...
...She has spoken to the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) officer who said they had the boy but no one could see him...
...In terms of housing, Derry has been totally rebuilt in the last ten years . . . . We have voting rights through proportional representation which is as fair as possible a system of voting . . . . One area we have not succeeded in is Commonweal: 682 jobs...
...Hume told me, "You know, this is a European election, to the European Parliament...
...No one spoke above a whisper...
...media...
...In the last European election I walked through the streets of Belfast canvassing...
...Hume told him, " I ' m asking for reelection to the European Parliament to bring more EEC money to Derry for jobs and housing...
...T HE FOLLOWING day I interviewed John Hume, who spoke at length about his life and work...
...He laughed...
...The office, funded partly by money from the European Economic Community, runs on a budget of $18,000 a year...
...That night, at 11 P.M., John Hume headed back to Derry through a light drizzle and fog...
...nationals, and encouraged other religious institutions to monitor their investments...
...Here he was being asked to assume the robes and solid gold chain of office of the Mayor of Derry...
...When Hume and the SDLP forces gathered after the polls closed at the mayor's office, spirits were high...
...I t never fails," said Hume's driver philosophically...
...Who would reckon it...
...Then an English TV crew filming for German television appeared, and with them a red-faced farmer who began harassing Hume...
...Last year, 118 church shareholder resolutions were filed with 85 major U.S...
...Might be a wee bit rough," said Pat...
...the taxi driver asked...
...The conditions in West Belfast were so appalling that I stopped...
...During World War II he worked in a shipyard, but after the war he was out of work...
...EEC money built that...
...Tearing up stickers won't stop votes...
...The business people, Unionists, controlled the town through a system of multiple voting...
...But the boy was in his own world...
...I called Hume knowing that his supporters were eager for him to get exposure in the U.S...
...Phil Coulter, ;n his song "The Town I Love So Well," sings of the factory horns that summon Derry's women to work while the men on the dole stay home with the children...
...Most of those attending were Unionist...
...a call was received at the SDLP office...
...That night over 500 SDLP supporters came to celebrate at Derry's Guildhall...
...Then seeing me taking a note he said, "Don't write that...
...Thursday would tell how well Hume's strategy had worked...
...A consequent slackening of interest in such ventures followed...
...The mayor of Derry, John Tierney, enters...
...Happened all during the campaign...
...But they also desire to create something more positive with their investments...
...He spoke to some punkers who stood on the corner near a large Danny Morrison poster...
...Since most of the polling places were primary schools, there was a terrible contrast between the heavily armed guards and the brightly colored children's paintings on the walls...
...They're all very good 14 December 1984:681 people and many of them will vote for me, but I'm not going to ask them more...
...So angry...
...Without her I couldn't go on...
...She worked for a shirt factory...
...Unless there's a dramatic initiative from the British government the situation here will deteriorate further...
...Well," replies Pat Hume, " I will continue to monitor the situation...
...Personation" involves going to a polling station, giving the name o f someone you either know wouldn't vote, or hadn't voted yet, and taking his or her vote...
...Inside every polling station six RUC men stood armed with machine guns and dressed in flack jackets...
...He ran a personal advice center for half of the town in our house...
...Today there are twelve thousand members in that credit union...
...So I just observed them up there singing with the crowd...
...This day the problems ranged from those of a woman who wanted the cupboard doors on her public housing unit repaired to the concerns of a man whose son had been taken from the house at 4 A.M...
...Should they intervene...
...We stopped at a cattle auction...
...Later in a nearby housing estate a ten-year-old girl told me, "In school some boys say 'Who's voting for Sinn Fein?' If you don't raise your hand they take your crisps (potato chips...
...We'll pass Ian Paisley's church today," John Hume said...
...Every canvassing and poll-watching team I was to observe was at least 50 percent female, a fact which significantly influenced the tone of the campaign...
...from arms sales to South Africa to boycotting coffee from Central American countries with records of human rights violations...
...They are paying increased attention to alternate forms of investment, to long-term loan projects which emphasize self-reliance, local control, and workers' participation in decision-making and profits...
...Pat Hume arrived, classically pretty -- without make-up, pretense, or nonsense...
...I became a teacher and taught French and history at St...
...at the earliest...
...Their determination to vote was obvious...
...He says that he has no telephone...
...It was very difficult for Catholics to get jobs, and he had a mind of his own...
...As we entered the Gallaigh public housing estate I saw a young man wheel a stroller down the sidewalk...
...A huge Sinn Fein banner stretched across this main shopping street picturing the face of their candidate, Danny Morrison, unc~er the slogan "One Country, One People...
...I noticed that my mother was paying back so much a week and her sisters were paying back so much a week, and if they put it all together every three weeks they would have a substantial amount of cash that they could be using for themselves...
...We had won the battle for political means of change...
...I went to the seminary, but after three years realized i! wasn't the life for me...
...When I later asked why there was no Hume II I i I MARY PAT KELLY is a screen-writer and the author of Martin Scorsesr and a forthcoming book, The Sovereign Woman: Her presence in the Literature of Ireland...
...If it is proved that deception is involved, the person can be arrested...
...I was born in Derry, the eldest of seven children...
...A twenty-two-yeai--old SDLP worker from Gobnascall, working as a poll-watcher in the Waterside, challenged a woman voter he'd seen at the polls twice already...
...The SDLP headquarters were cityside in the Strand Road...
...We convinced him," a city council member said...
...On the old wooden floor dancers from ten-years-old to ninetythree jammed together doing everything from the twist to the hokey pokey...
...One young man, with a Sinn Fein sticker, wore a leather jacket and had three bleached white plumes of hair sticking up from a shaved skull...
...In 1975 the Provos shot dead the head of Du Pont, which is the biggest employer in the city, in order to stop any investment coming in...
...Before opening this center Pat Hume taught school for twenty years...
...Mayor John Tierney, poll-watching at St...
...Joseph primary school, where I delivered tea, a woman of sixty started crying when told her vote and the votes of her family were gone...
...There's always somebody wants to be on the telly...
...Oh deep in my heart I do believe . . . . " SELF-RELIANCE, LOCAL CONTROL, WORKER OWNERSHIP A positive alternative for religious Investors CAROL COSTON have precipitated a variety of changes in corporate policy...
...Before his election to the city council, Tiemey, thirty-one, like 54 percent of the male population of Derry, was unemployed...
...It was still raining on Wednesday when John Hume canvassed Derry...
...she called the neighbor...
...In 1968 when I went in the streets for civil rights I had no intention of getting into politics...
...When one young man in Gallaigh launched a verbal attack on a woman canvasser, she totally disarmed him by saying, "Ach, a good looking young fella like you with Sinn Fein...
...Excuse me miss," a man of about sixty said after I had entered the office, "could we put your bag in the back...
...Finally it was decided: "vote early and have the baby after the election...
...Seeing somethin' like that'll scare a bit of sense into ye...
...Eugene's school, was surrounded by a gang of young Sinn Fein supporters...
...I sa ~hey laughed...
...It's spread all over Ireland...
...Later, at the St...
...But some junior Sinn Feiners took exception...
...John Hume's campaign in Derry was managed by Berna Mclver, a teacher and mother of four teenagers...
...Cardinal O'Fiaich is coming to preside over a celebration in the Creggan parish church on June 17, and the people want to spruce up their fences and gates...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
