Hume’s origin story: fighting injustice at every corner…

It is incumbent upon us all to remember what propelled a young teacher in Derry into frontline politics and change the face of Northern Ireland forever. The young teacher was John Hume, born into a working-class catholic family he had been given opportunities not afforded to generations before and attended University. In the words of that other Derry giant (Gerry Anderson) his generation of queens’ graduates [para] “went away to university, learned about the country they lived in and came back pissed off.”

Hume was at the heart of this 1960s cultural awakening (which wasn’t unique to NI of course). Young men and women across the western world began questioning every structure around them, every power and every illegitimate exercise of authority. Hume used his energies to establish the “University for Derry Committee” which united unionist hardliners with nationalists and even socialists to fight for the establishment of the New University of Ulster in the second city.

Derry had been gerrymandered ever since the abolition of PR voting in local elections in the 1920s. Unionist councillors clinched onto power by controlling the allocation of seats per districts and allowing voting only on the basis of property ownership, including company ownership, which meant that someone with established business connections in London could vote in the elections of Londonderry without stepping foot in the place.

The university campaign epitomised the fears and prejudices of the time. Established by the Lockwood committee the unionist administration ensured that a veneer of respectability was maintained at all times. The report did not have an examination of where to place the new university within its legal remit, yet it took submissions and recommended one all the same. The Londonderry corporation for years had refused to build adequate housing in areas which might upset the voting balance, and this resulted in an acute housing shortage in the city.

The Lockwood committee used this as evidence for the unsuitability of the city. This enraged activists who could see plainly that this was an exclusion by design, the very same party of government who had refused to build adequate housing had used its new university committee to exclude the city on the basis of a shortage of housing. The structural sectarianism couldn’t have been clearer, and it led Hume to quickly campaign on the issue of access to housing.

It was laid bare during these campaigns that a larger sectarian game was being played by the state itself. According to minutes of a meeting between the so called “faceless men” (unionist reps from Derry lobbying against their own city) and the ‘moderate’ Prime Minister “O’Neill wondered about the intended number of Protestant employees and asked ‘how’, in the event of industrialization in Derry, ‘is it possible to insure against a radical increase in R[oman] C[atholic] papes [sic]?” (source: CAIN)

It is important to remember this pre-civil rights campaign and how it laid the groundwork for the systemic change which was about to come. The university campaign was not some fringe issue which the modern campaign is sometimes claimed, it was not only a precursor but a glaring totem for how wrong the old Northern Ireland was. We spend time arguing over the effect of this policy or that law, but we never consider that decisions that weren’t taken. John Hume recognised this from the beginning, his life was one of overcoming injustice wherever he saw it and it is this passion which is captured so perfectly in the spiritual “we shall overcome…”