Opinion

Newton Emerson: Hume's peace vision may have been right all along

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Was former SDLP leader John Hume right all along? 
Was former SDLP leader John Hume right all along?  Was former SDLP leader John Hume right all along? 

THROUGHOUT the first decade of the peace process, Sinn Féin chided unionists for playing “the politics of the empty chair”.

Surveying the empty republican seats in Stormont and Westminster, it is a wonder this faux-pained little dig has not been returned.

Stomping off in magnificent frustration while calling your demands “equality” seems no less a denial of political gravity than unionists engaged in 20 years ago.

Perhaps that is exactly why unionists are not making the comparison. Instead, they are imagining new seating arrangements.

UUP MEP Jim Nicholson wants the secretary of state to set up a Northern Ireland Brexit advisory council, in the absence of an executive.

This would comprise the main Stormont party leaders plus the region’s three MEPs - providing a chair for Sinn Féin (as well as for Nicholson.)

By contrast, unionists only need apply for the Tory-DUP “coordination committee” contained in both parties’ Westminster agreement.

A first reading of the two separate documents in that agreement suggests the committee will have no role in Northern Ireland. This has just been reiterated by the secretary of state, who is barred from the committee to emphasise its Westminster-only nature.

However, because a role in Northern Ireland is not specifically ruled out, every day that passes without Stormont makes the committee look more and more like a mini-executive in waiting.

Nationalists have begun calling for clarity on this as DUP figures increasingly call for direct rule - probably a negotiating bluff on the unionists’ part, but one the committee makes more credible.

For all the immediate political ramifications of the coordination committee, it is Nicholson’s proposal that is ultimately more revealing. It recalls John Hume’s original vision for the peace process, which would have seen Northern Ireland run by a six-person executive committee comprising three directly elected members plus one appointee each from London, Dublin and Brussels.

This neatly coincided with what were then the six departments of the Northern Ireland civil service.

Gerry Adams appears to have at least humoured Hume’s committee - the proposal emerged from the 1990 Hume-Adams dialogue.

It may look like an eccentric idea now, on a par with Peter Robinson’s contemporary musings on an independent Northern Ireland. But it was very much in line with Hume’s entire constitutional philosophy up to that point - the mid-point of his two-decade leadership of nationalism.

The SDLP that Hume helped to found in 1970, when he became its deputy leader, aimed to achieve the goals of the Civil Rights Association by fully participating in Stormont as an active opposition - ending half a century of ambivalence towards an institution nationalists had often boycotted.

When this hope collapsed along with Stormont two years later, Hume seemed determined never to make the same mistake again. His new goal was to externalise the Northern Ireland problem, with Dublin, Washington and latterly Brussels counterbalancing London. Any purely internal settlement, regardless of its power-sharing element, was doomed.

In the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, for instance, Hume insisted on a powerful Council of Ireland - a controversial idea even within his own party. In the 1980s, when Hume was party leader, the SDLP abstained from the four-year ‘rolling devolution’ experiment at Stormont, eventually bringing it down.

Instead, Hume persuaded Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald to set up the New Ireland Forum, to consider united Ireland and joint authority models. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, on which Hume had considerable influence, seemed to move towards joint authority by committee, so expanding on the idea with Adams was not eccentric at all.

This may have been an overwhelmingly nationalist vision but it could have been sold to unionists as a permanent settlement, unlike the Good Friday Agreement’s slippery slope to a unitary Irish state.

Once the peace process got going in earnest, however, the demise of Hume’s committee was almost inevitable. It was too much at odds with the wishes of unionists, who had to be accommodated, whatever the SDLP leader thought of them. There was on obvious democratic deficit in a half-appointed executive, plus no sign that Brussels in particular was interested in acquiring a protectorate.

There was also not enough on offer to all players in Northern Ireland - not enough places at the trough, to be blunt. The enormous apparatus agreed in 1998 showed the importance of that consideration.

But looking back over all of this, the reasoning behind it, the subconscious unionist concurrence, the current failure of Stormont and the challenge ahead from Brexit, an eccentric question occurs. Was Hume right all along?