Of all the voices I listened to over the past week on the Good Friday Agreement one stood out for me - that of Pat Hume, wife of the former SDLP leader John Hume.
Pat is much more than the wife of a Nobel prize winner. She has been a teacher, a mother, a confidant, wise counsel, calming influence and, of course, as Foyle constituents knew, if you wanted anything done when John Hume was an MP you went to see Pat.
I didn’t meet Pat Hume until about 1986 but I became aware of her in February 1984 whilst I was studying in Belfast. There was nothing redeeming about Belfast back then, it was grim and grey. As students we never ventured much off the Golden Mile - which had nothing golden about it other than being the safest route back to the Europa bus station.
I joined the SDLP a few months earlier in 1983 after the IRA planted a bomb in the Jordanstown campus of the University of Ulster which killed three young police officers, not one of them had reached the age of thirty. Others were injured too including Nuala O’Loan, the former Police Ombudsman. Tragically she lost the baby she was then carrying.
That an indiscriminate bomb could be left in a place of learning and back then in one of the few shared spaces for students of all denominations meant that you had choices to make.
The groundless claim first uttered by the late David Ervine of the UVF and then echoed many leading members of Sinn Féin that “we all had a hand in the past”, that “we were all in it together” was simply not true.
There were those with guns and there was the rest of us - the majority who had no guns. I made my choice and it would not involve encouraging any child to lift a gun for any cause.
As a result, I was frequently picking up leaflets to distribute from the indefatigable Gerry Cosgrove of the SDLP and Claire Hanna’s father Eamon who was general secretary.
To add to my propaganda armoury, Eamon rather bizarrely gave me an LP (that’s vinyl to younger readers) of 32 versions of the Internationale or the Red Flag. Thankfully I was more into Echo and the Bunnymen and Madness.
So back to 1984, skiving off a statistics class, I was walking up University Street when I stumbled across the instantly recognisable John Hume staring blankly into the engine of his car. Despite his numerous skills, the art of motor vehicle maintenance was not one of them.
His battery was not only flat but dead as a dodo. From a phone box we contacted a garage who came and replaced it. The only problem was that Hume, like the Queen, wasn’t carrying any money. Unfortunately, fame doesn’t help in such situations. The result was a student living on £25 per week ended up buying a battery for an Audi. It was the equivalent of a month’s supply of Fray Bentos and Smithwicks. About a month later, when John obviously remembered to tell someone, I got a beautiful handwritten card from Pat Hume apologising for the delay, thanking me for being a good Samaritan and gave me a top up on my outlay. Being a notorious hoarder, I kept that card.
Pat Hume has not changed in all those years. She’s got a steely determination behind that wonderful smile and last week we discovered that she has a voice too.
Pat told the BBC that to break the current stalemate that both sides needed a “good heart and generosity.” She also reminded the DUP and Sinn Féin that in 1998 the issues dividing all parties were much greater than today. Constitutional issues, prisoner releases and reform of policing totally outweigh the matters which separate the two big parties today. Mrs Hume said politics here had become small, whereas John always looked towards the big picture (often leaving Seamus Mallon to infill the detail).
Pat Hume asked people to reach out to the other side and to look for the humanity in their decision making. Odd that her visionary outlook and simple words were lost on some in the SDLP in the same week.
That said, Pat Hume was as upbeat as ever. This is a woman of substance who comforted her husband in his darkest days and even now is his guiding light as shadows eclipse his memory.
Pat Hume is truly the Irish Coretta Scott King.
