John Hume emerged in 1964 as a modernising voice within the stale and defeated world of Catholic Nationalist politics in Northern Ireland – a world in which the Unionists seemed to hold all the cards, including their relative prosperity on the island of Ireland.
His first major intervention was to insist that the credo of Unionism could not be reduced to sectarian bigotry. It was, at that time, a liberating and progressive notion. When the archaic elements of Unionism were exposed by the civil rights movement in 1968-69, Hume emerged as an articulate spokesman for reform. In 1970 the reformist politics of the Civil Rights Movement were displaced by the rise of political violence and the IRA. Hume, to his enduring credit, always opposed violence and narrow nationalism – he liked to quote his father: ‘You can’t eat a flag’.
At the beginning of June 1970, Nell McCafferty published an evocative article in the Irish Times on ‘Anarchy in the Bogside’.
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