John Hume ranks with Parnell and other great Irish leaders, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
John Hume was accepting handshakes from SDLP supporters, preparing for one-to-one camera interviews in the Wellington Park Hotel in Belfast yesterday after his noon announcement that he is bowing out of political life.
His sometime rival but steadfast ally, Seamus Mallon, looked on rather wistfully. Fancy a job in Europe, Seamus, as John Hume's replacement, we asked? "John the Baptist came before Jesus, not after him," the Armagh man said.
Mr Mallon wasn't being blasphemous, just a little mischievous, while at the same time paying solid tribute to a truly giant Irish political figure of the 20th century.
He could have chosen as a better comparison Charles Stewart Parnell, another politician who fought the age-old Irish battle for constitutionalism against violent means of pursuing political objectives.
In the end, Parnell failed as later Pearse and Connolly and Collins and de Valera opted for the violent route after the repeated Home Rule failures in the face of the Orange card, carving out the Free State and later the Republic, but leaving a divided island and people.
The same battle was fought in these Troubles, with the Armalite and the AK 47 of the IRA continuing the violent struggle to force the creation of a united territory.
It's all part of the peaceful/violent cycle of Irish history and it took a historian, Hume, to find strategies to break that murderous circle - which is his crowning achievement. He said at the press conference yesterday that it was "the historian in me took on the IRA".
He explained how in advance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 he tried to persuade Margaret Thatcher to effectively declare Britain neutral on the future of Northern Ireland.
Those words of Britain having no "selfish, economic or strategic" interest in the North were made fact in the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, a document that flowed from the earlier Hume-Adams negotiations. That simple phrase destroyed the IRA's argument for violence because to continue the war meant that the IRA was not killing to expel the British but to kick out those they claimed were fellow Irish people, the unionists.
Republicans continue to claim that the violence of the IRA played the major part in convincing the British to make commitments they never wanted to make.
Hume's response yesterday was, "I am very pleased that Sinn Féin have changed their mind and their approach because for the last 30 years were they right or wrong? I mean, that's the real question. Was violence right or wrong?" Equally, he set the agenda for the negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement almost six years ago: resolving the three sets of relationships at the heart of the conflict - between unionist and nationalist in Northern Ireland, between the North and the South, between Britain and Ireland. That remains work in progress but odds are we will get there - eventually.
He is justifiably called the architect of the peace process. The SDLP may suffer further travails in the months and years ahead but it can remain proud it stuck to its peaceful principles - spilling sweat not blood, as Hume said ad nauseam - and more importantly, even if some members faltered during Hume-Adams in the early 1990s, holding its nerve.
The old teacher as well as the historian in Hume believes in repeating a message until it is hammered home. Effectively he has been arguing his "agreed Ireland" since he entered politics on civil rights platforms in the 1960s.
He travelled Europe, US, the world, gaining high- stature international friends to support his endeavours, while at the same time, like no other Northern politician, instilling nationalists with a formidable self-esteem and confidence.
Hume was always obdurate. His opponents, and sometimes his friends, could mock his repetitiveness of language but he didn't care. He joked again yesterday about his "single transferable speech" or "Humespeak" but it was the intellectual and rational force of the case behind it that mattered and in the end carried the day.
That's a remarkable achievement because republicans - if they have learned anything over the past 10 years - learned that it was when they stopped killing people that they started making huge political gains. The trouble for the SDLP and Hume was that it was at their expense.
But, and here's the essence of Hume and to a point the other party visionary, Seamus Mallon, they were prepared to make that sacrifice if it meant creating and sustaining the peace.
"True republicanism is real agreement between Protestant and Catholic, and real mutual respect, not victory by one side over the other," said Hume yesterday, encapsulating his philosophy.
Fine words but no consolation for new party leader Mark Durkan. How do you replace such a candidate for the European elections in June, and at such short notice? That certainly was a failing of Hume's: he did not prepare the succession and he did not pay attention to organisation, as is glaringly evident by Sinn Féin's superiority in this regard.
Sinn Féin could take Hume's seats in Europe and Westminster but it won't undermine Hume being up there on a high political pedestal with Parnell - and being more successful - or the fact that if Sinn Féin politicians further undermine the SDLP it will be because they are diverting to the constitutional path charted for them by John Hume.