The ten-year period stretching from September 1954 until September 1964 is arguably the most important in John Hume's intellectual biography. At its outset the future long-serving leader of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and major architect of the Northern Ireland peace process entered St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the National Roman Catholic Seminary of Ireland and constituent college of the National University of Ireland, to complete a BA Honours degree in French and Modern History.Footnote 1 A decade later, he submitted his MA thesis in Modern History at the college, ‘Social and economic aspects of the growth of Derry, 1825–1850’, a study of his native city.Footnote 2 In a short biography written for the January 1970 edition of the Redemptorist publication Reality, which had dubbed Hume Ireland's ‘Man of the Year’ for 1969 (largely owing to his prominence, as MP for Foyle, in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement), journalist Sean Breslin mused that the impact of St Patrick's upon his subject's thinking was ‘a matter for more extensive and subtle treatment’.Footnote 3
This analytical enterprise has yet to be attempted, despite Hume's status as one of the most influential politicians in modern Irish history. Neglect of his seminary experience is curious given that, traditionally, Irish historians have been intrigued by the historical imaginations exhibited by their country's leading figures.Footnote 4 This study is particularly timely given scholars are becoming ever-more interested in the complex relationship between Catholic culture and teaching, and the increasingly self-consciously modern society emerging on the island during the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 5
Apart from rudimentary profiles of Hume the seminarian offered by three journalistic biographies, and a short, insightful (though commonly overlooked) treatment of the influence of Hume's studies in history on his early political identity supplied by Owen Dudley Edwards, little serious thought has been devoted to the relationship between the intellectual ethos of St Patrick's, Hume's vision of history, and the evolution of his political thinking.Footnote 6 Naturally, authors have been fascinated by the Derryman's career. A prime example is Maurice Fitzpatrick's recent study of Hume's successful drive to win powerful Irish-American politicians, such as Edward Kennedy and Thomas ‘Tip’ O'Neill, to his cause, and the immense influence he wielded subsequently over British, Irish, and US policy on Northern Ireland.Footnote 7 Yet this article demonstrates how many of Hume's key political ideas appeared in fledgling form in a short work of historical fiction that he wrote as a second-year seminarian in Maynooth.
Set during the French Revolution, Hume's story ‘Fraternité’ appeared at Easter 1956 in the tenth-anniversary edition of the St Patrick's magazine The Silhouette.Footnote 8 This also contained a ‘Junior Diary’ of seminary life kept by Hume between September 1955 and February 1956.Footnote 9 These constitute his earliest identifiable published writings. The ‘Junior Diary’ opens a window onto a previously obscure, though formative intellectual environment within his biography. ‘The square has a splash of colour these days for the hierarchy are here’, he wrote (for example) in his entry for 11 October 1955: ‘Their meeting was held today and while the Bishops poured over problems we romped about in freedom enjoying the sunshine.’Footnote 10 That said, ‘Fraternité’ is the more revealing piece. The ‘Junior Diary’ gives historians a fleeting portrait of a maturing Hume within a walled, cloistered setting. ‘Fraternité’, however, bequeaths a vivid glimpse of the historical and political dimensions of the Derryman's youthful imagination at play and, significantly, clues as to the key intellectual influences acting upon it.
In I remember Maynooth (1945), former seminarian Neil Kevin insisted that his education at St Patrick's was fundamentally apolitical: ‘we took our politics, like our trunks to Maynooth; and took them home with us at the end of seven years’.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, ‘Fraternité’ indicates that as a seminarian Hume was developing a mode of nationalist thought subsequently influential in British and Irish history, one informed by a discourse on the concept of patriotism evolving amongst Ireland's Catholic intelligentsia. The story and his subsequent MA thesis also reveal that St Patrick's infused Hume's imagination with a discernible Platonic quality, heavily influencing his vision of his native walled city of Derry, and of that larger partitioned entity, Northern Ireland. Moreover, ‘Fraternité’ illustrates how Hume's intellect was influenced by visions of history, Irish and otherwise, ancient and modern, many of which he received from Rev. Tomás Ó Fiaich, a fellow northerner from Anamar, Co. Armagh, who was appointed Maynooth's first lecturer in Modern History in October 1953.Footnote 12 A former student at St Patrick's, recently returned from the Catholic University of Louvain (where he gained the Licentiate in Historical Sciences), Ó Fiaich began lecturing in September 1954.Footnote 13 He emerged as something of a public intellectual and became president of the college in 1974.Footnote 14 Appointed archbishop of Armagh and primate of all-Ireland in August 1977, he was an outspoken critic of British policy in Northern Ireland throughout the republican protests in the Maze Prison during the late 1970s.Footnote 15
Thus, Hume was amongst Ó Fiaich's first students, and he would supervise and influence the youth's postgraduate research. Indeed, Hume's ‘Social and economic aspects of the growth of Derry’ resembles a course taken by Ó Fiaich for the Licentiate, ‘The origins and growth of medieval towns with special reference to Louvain’, delivered by the Belgian historian Leon Van der Essen.Footnote 16 Before considering Louvain, the latter examined ‘in general the growth of towns’, highlighting the importance of walls: ‘during the M.A. [Middle Ages] the enceinte was the significant thing in a town – liberté existed only within it’.Footnote 17 When ‘there was no more place for people within the enceinte’, he continued, ‘they settled down around the ports and on roads out’.Footnote 18 It was a process Hume depicted in his thesis. For example, he observed how the ‘nineteenth century influx of Donegal people settled mainly in the new streets that sprang up near the Bogside’ (a western area of the city, lying outside the walls, where Hume grew up), close to ‘the new building sites and provision yards of the port’.Footnote 19
The discovery of ‘Fraternité’ exposes a problematic interpretative framework now ensconced within the relevant scholarship. In studies of the development of northern nationalism and the SDLP by Gerard Murray, Peter McLoughlin, and Sarah Campbell, Hume repeatedly appears in Irish history in May 1964, more or less intellectually fully formed, articulating a relatively sophisticated political philosophy through a mature and well-written newspaper article published by The Irish Times, ‘The Northern Catholic’.Footnote 20 Written whilst he was completing his thesis (and before he had formally entered politics), Hume insisted that Catholic nationalists should engage with Northern Ireland instead of indolently pining for reunification. By doing so, they could improve their quality of life but also, crucially, earn the trust of the Unionist community, possibly precipitating a harmonious, united Ireland. ‘If the whole Northern Community gets seriously to work on its problems’, he contended, ‘the Unionists’ bogeys about Catholics and a Republic will, through better understanding, disappear. It will, of course, take a long time.’Footnote 21
Richard English rightly applauds McLoughlin's work as the best contribution to the existing scholarship.Footnote 22 As with the monograph on Hume's political evolution supplied by Murray, however, McLoughlin's study is devoid of reference to his subject's relationship with St Patrick's, despite claiming his text closely examined Hume's ‘ideas and where they originated’.Footnote 23 This oversight is not surprising. Hume has been guarded about his seminary experience. His reflections upon his time in Maynooth have been consistently unenlightening. Throughout his career, he said little more than that he studied to be a priest for three years but ‘decided to give it up’.Footnote 24 A mistake, perhaps, on the part of reporter Denis McGrath, or merely a misprint, in an interview for The Sunday Independent in November 1968 Hume claimed that he received his BA from University College Dublin, not St Patrick's.Footnote 25 Of course, Hume's education in a Catholic seminary has always conflicted with his status as the great, avowedly non-sectarian Irish peacemaker. It is telling, for instance, that in Fitzpatrick's reverential study the seminary experience has again been largely airbrushed from Hume's biography.Footnote 26 There is a similarity here with the way in which, in the later 1990s, that marketing of David Trimble as a consensual Unionist modernizer was undermined by his enthusiastic immersion in William Craig's hard-line Vanguard Unionist movement during the 1970s, and Trimble's angry leadership of the Orange besieged during the major stand-offs at Drumcree in 1995 and 1996.
That said, neglect of the evident relationship between Maynooth and Hume's political thinking seems largely a consequence of scholarly preoccupation with the wider history of northern nationalism since the 1950s, and the tendency to utilize Hume as a vehicle for exploring this. Though understandable, this has led scholars to account for his early thought by re-contextualizing it. Like Murray, McLoughlin argued that in formulating the ideas he advanced in ‘The Northern Catholic’, Hume drew upon a ‘pre-existing or at least incipient revisionism’ within northern nationalism, as evidenced by the emergence of progressive groupings such as National Unity in 1959 and the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1965.Footnote 27 Although McLoughlin acknowledged that Hume was not involved with either, he maintained that the latter's influence stemmed from his ability to ‘capture the spirit of change abroad in his community in the early to mid-1960s’; to ‘speak for northern nationalists’; to convey ‘the mood of the minority’.Footnote 28 More recently, Campbell has drawn attention to ‘The Northern Catholic’, again insisting that it was ‘indicative of a revision of Nationalist perspectives’.Footnote 29 Consequently, she has also adopted the perspective, advanced by Ian McAllister in 1977, that ‘many of the objectives it [the SDLP] held to be important were taken from precedents already established by other parties and groups’.Footnote 30
That is not to say that it is incorrect to posit a link between Hume's early political thinking and pre-existing currents of thought. Cross-fertilization of ideas no doubt occurred. As Annabel Brett has cautioned, however, when tracking ideologies there exists the danger of ‘submerging the author in discourse’.Footnote 31 This article does not advocate a return to approaches to northern nationalism and the SDLP that focus primarily on Hume; nor, indeed, to that once hegemonic perspective on the Derryman encapsulated by a statement allegedly made by an Irish individual after hearing Hume speak at the Oxford Union in 1983: ‘I wonder how many people here realize that every new idea about Ireland has come out of that man's head?’Footnote 32 Still, the wider history of northern nationalism since the late 1950s has been presented very much as Hume's own early intellectual biography. This has resulted in a vexing historiographical situation whereby the individual who produced ‘The Northern Catholic’ has been partitioned from his intellectual hinterland, and rendered a mere mouthpiece, albeit an articulate and influential mouthpiece, for a prevailing political discourse. New sources – ‘Fraternité’; Ó Fiaich's lecture notes; Hume's transcriptions of these lectures – upset existing narratives. They reveal how Hume's mode of so-called ‘revisionist’ or ‘new’ nationalism, ubiquitously modern as it appeared in the context of 1960s Ireland, fed off visions of history and drew upon much older strands of Catholic political thought than scholars have hitherto countenanced.
I
‘Fraternité’ opens on Sunday 12 July 1789, the eve of the French Revolution, with ‘a small ragged little man…scurrying through the damp streets of Paris’.Footnote 33 It is Pierre Dubois, a hardworking yet poor Parisian, ‘one of those who, daily on the streets of Paris, never seem to attract any attention’. After a profitable day's work, he is rushing home to spend ‘his usual peaceful evening’ with his family.Footnote 34 Hume's Dubois ‘never thought of the injustices to which he was subject’: having ‘paid taxes for so long he had now begun to take them for granted and he held no rancour in his heart for those high and mighty nobles who were really the cause of any misery he suffered’.Footnote 35 As long ‘as his little family remained happy’, Pierre ‘was content to trundle his little barrow and sell his wares on the cobbled Parisian streets’.Footnote 36
Whilst hurrying past the gardens of the Palais Royal, Dubois hears the ‘wild shouts and cries of a mob’. ‘Liberté, down with the tyrants…Egalité…Fraternité’, they shout, whilst ‘a young man − Camille Desmoulins − stood above them gesticulating wildly − as Frenchmen do…pouring every ounce of himself into the words that he gave forth’.Footnote 37 Desmoulins, described by Hume as an ‘expert in his art’, carries Dubois ‘along the stony road of injustice suffered by the tiers état’.Footnote 38 An ‘uncontrollable anger’ surges up in Pierre, and soon he is shouting with the mob.Footnote 39 The next morning, he arrives home drunken and blood-stained: a ‘night spent rioting and looting had left him thus’.Footnote 40 Before his wife passes out from shock, she hears him mumble the words ‘Liberté…Egalité…Fraternité’.Footnote 41 The next day, he seeks to convince her ‘how the Revolution would lift them [their children] out of their misery’, but she stands firm in her ‘condemnation of the movement’.Footnote 42 On 14 July, Pierre rushes home to tell his wife the great news, the ‘power of the nobility − symbolised in the Bastille − had been razed to the ground’, only to find a note from her on the table:
The note slipped from his trembling fingers and fluttered to the ground as he stood there in the half-light staring fixedly at the opposite wall where the dancing shadows, projected by the dying flames of the fire, seemed to spell out those awful words: ‘Gone with the children to see my brother Jean in the Bastille.’…A slight stooping figure stood in front of the black and smoking mass that was the Bastille…His thumping headache re-echoed the rhythm of the guns, the roaring mob and the flames of that morning. And beating through the heavy mist that was his brain, beating to the same rhythm, were the jumbled meaningless words: Liberté…Egalité…Fraternité…Gone with the children…Liberté…Revolution will lift them out of their…Egalité…to the Bastille to see my brother Jean…Fraternité…All gone, all dead! dead! dead!…Fraternité.Footnote 43
Is it possible to trace the story's ideological provenance? An obvious intellectual origin is surely the fortress-like essence of St Patrick's itself. ‘Maynooth forces a certain amount of history upon us’, as Neil Kevin put it.Footnote 44 The college naturally conjured visions of the French Revolution which gave it life: St Patrick's existence owed much to the repression of the French church and nationalization of its lands by the National Assembly. The desire on the part of the British government, largely prompted by Edmund Burke, to insulate the Irish Roman Catholic Church, and thus the country at large, from republican zeal was a key factor in bringing about the establishment of the college in 1795. As Patrick Corish highlighted, many of its first professors were ‘émigrés from the Revolution, Irish as well as French’.Footnote 45
As a seminarian, Hume would not only have imbibed visions of the Revolution, but of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen too, departing St Patrick's acutely aware of the genesis of modern republicanism in Ireland and Europe. It might even be suggested that, in terms of title and the argument it advanced, Hume's ‘The Northern Catholic’ bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Tone's influential An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791).Footnote 46 Hume's decision to begin ‘Fraternité’ on 12 July 1789 is also thought-provoking, given the sheer importance of the date for Orangeism. Could it be that Hume was highlighting how the date is sacred in the origin sagas of both modern republicanism and Irish loyalism, despite the clashing of these ideologies in his native Ulster?
A seminarian in Maynooth would also have been familiar with the legacy of the most famous and forceful critic of the Revolution, Edmund Burke.Footnote 47 Kevin described him as the ‘most honourable of Irishmen’, and was conscious that his college library housed autographed volumes donated by the great Whig after the death of his son.Footnote 48 Burke's Reflections on the revolution in France (1790) was standard reading for the compulsory first-year course in English during Kevin's seminary days.Footnote 49 When Hume arrived, the syllabus had changed: he studied Burke's Speech on conciliation with America (1775).Footnote 50 It is unlikely Hume left Maynooth ignorant of Burke's Reflections, however. He would have been introduced to it at the beginning of Ó Fiaich's first-year course ‘European History, 1789–1871’.Footnote 51 This presumably opened with the French Revolution, and covered the unification of Italy and Germany.
Ó Fiaich's perspective on the Revolution can be discerned in his treatment of ‘Irish scholars and soldiers abroad’ halfway through the second year of his honours course ‘Modern Irish History: 1485–1780’.Footnote 52 The two Irish colleges in Paris, he explained, housed the majority of Irish clerical students in France, but were ‘suppressed during the Revolution’.Footnote 53 He highlighted how the Irish seminary in Bordeaux was also suppressed; its superior Patrick Everard forced to return to Ireland, becoming fourth president of St Patrick's and later archbishop of Cashel.Footnote 54 The Irish college in Toulouse did not survive. According to a clearly embittered Ó Fiaich, the building was ‘confiscated and sold’, the Irish bishops never ‘receiving a penny from the sale’.Footnote 55
Interestingly, whilst surveying the Irish colleges Ó Fiaich argued that ‘Irish people have been influenced by the Anglo-Saxon idea of Paris in the 18th [century].’Footnote 56 He urged Hume and his fellow students to be mindful, therefore, how ‘Paris was [then] the capital of Catholic Ireland rather than Dublin, for Paris was the capital of its hopes and aspirations and Dublin of its fears and laws.’Footnote 57 In Ó Fiaich's eyes, the Revolution wounded the French church, stripping Catholic Ireland of its spiritual capital, and undoing advances made by Irish clerics there in terms of preserving a faith suppressed in their homeland. That Hume's ‘Fraternité’ should have been inherently opposed to the Revolution (and set in Paris) was to be expected, therefore, given that Ó Fiaich's history and St Patrick's were fundamental sources of inspiration.
During his first year, Hume also studied French under Hubert Schild, a polyglot from Lorraine who taught the ‘History of France’ using Louis Madelin's scholarship.Footnote 58 Given the subject matter of ‘Fraternité’, and St Patrick's institutional connections to that event, Hume almost certainly studied Madelin's classic 1911 history of the Revolution (translated into English in 1916).Footnote 59 For one thing, Hume's hardworking and originally non-politicized Dubois bears an uncanny resemblance to those ‘honest artisans’ who, as Madelin saw it, would have been ‘content with very little’, but whose ‘wretchedness’ was exploited by bourgeois ideologues such as Desmoulins.Footnote 60 Madelin's description of Desmoulins at the Palais Royal is actually rather similar to Hume's depiction of the latter ‘gesticulating wildly − as Frenchmen do’. ‘All of a sudden a name was spoken’, Madelin wrote, ‘Desmoulins! Camille bounded on to a chair, a tall, bilious-looking, sinewy figure, wildly excited. “To arms!” he cried.’Footnote 61
‘Faternité’ betrays the influence of another text: Plato's The republic, an ‘old stalwart’ of the first-year course in Maynooth, as Kevin described it.Footnote 62 Hume would have encountered the text in compulsory ‘First Arts’ courses such as Rev. James Bastable's ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ and Rev. Dermot O'Donoghue's ‘Logic’.Footnote 63 The ending of ‘Fraternité’ invokes probably the most influential part of The republic: the beginning of Book vii where Plato introduced his cave metaphor into Western thought.Footnote 64 After reading the terrible note left by his wife, Dubois stares ‘fixedly at the opposite wall where the dancing shadows, projected by the dying flames of the fire, seemed to spell out those awful words: “Gone with the children to see my brother Jean in the Bastille.”’
So Hume recreated Plato's cave in Dubois's little home – a prison where men perpetually quarrel about the nature of shadows cast on a wall by a fire behind their heads. It is, of course, on reading the note that the latter finally perceives reality, becoming aware of the fictitiousness of the beliefs he held about the efficacy of revolution. This phase of Hume's story is undoubtedly modelled upon the moment that one of Plato's cave-dwellers is dragged to the earth's surface, perceiving reality painfully for the first time.Footnote 65 It is natural that a seminarian should have incorporated a key concept from The republic in his story about the French Revolution, juxtaposing the ideal form of (in the church's view) civic and essentially proto-Christian republicanism forged by Plato, with the corrupted and, more importantly, anti-clerical mode of republicanism that emerged in France as a consequence of the Enlightenment, spreading to Ireland with dire historical consequences.
As a seminarian, Hume would not only have studied The republic, but also texts such as Augustine's The city of God against the pagans, a work about earthly cities and their heavenly ideal.Footnote 66 As one of Hume's contemporaries at St Patrick's put it, it was ‘hard to escape the influence of Plato and Augustine’.Footnote 67 Such texts no doubt resonated with Hume because they appealed to his urban background. A seminary education would have reinforced and fostered his interest in his city and urbanism (apparently he arrived at St Patrick's with an ‘encyclopaedic knowledge of Derry and its history’) helping to precipitate his decision to produce a history of Derry under Ó Fiaich.Footnote 68
Consequently, it is revealing that the first shot of Hume's and Terence McDonald's 1963 film A city solitary (basically a visual representation of the thesis Hume was preparing) featured a panorama of Derry, overlaid with a citation lifted from Lamentations: ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people.’Footnote 69 Thus, Hume compared the plight of Derry to Jerusalem besieged by the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzer, situating his city's history within an ancient, biblical lineage. It would appear Hume's schooling in a Catholic seminary led him to see his own walled city through the lens of biblical walled cities such as Jericho and Jerusalem, if not also Greek city-states such as Athens and Sparta. One also thinks of his affinity with Psalm 122, featuring the lines ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem…may there be peace within thy walls.’Footnote 70 There is a connection here with the way in which, as Marianne Elliott and Ian McBride have highlighted, Ulster Protestant identity has tended to invoke Old Testament imagery, and claim an ancient, Israelite ancestry (the town of Sion Mills near Derry comes to mind).Footnote 71 It is also worth highlighting how Unionists have tended to look upon nationalist orientated political developments, such as the detested Council of Ireland proposed (largely at Hume's insistence) in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, with reference to the ancient precedent of the Trojan Horse.Footnote 72
If Hume recreated Plato's cave within Dubois's little home in ‘Fraternité’, he did something similar in his history of Derry, though on a larger scale. The way that the city's Protestant population had, in his eyes, emerged from behind their walls during the mid-nineteenth century – realizing their fear of living outside of these defences had been largely irrational – parallels Plato's prisoner making the transition from the cave to the land above; from darkness to light; from illusion to reality. If Hume's thesis indicates anything, in fact, it is that he viewed the walled city of Derry as it existed before the mid-nineteenth century as a microcosmic Northern Ireland, and the partitioned entity of Northern Ireland as a macrocosmic, pre-nineteenth-century Derry, a very Platonic intellectual motif. Plato theorized his republic in order to understand the nature of justice in cities and thus in the soul: ‘we shall begin our inquiry in cities…[continuing it] in the individual also, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’.Footnote 73 Hume's tendency to refer to Derry as the ‘heart of the Irish problem’, as he did in John Hume's Derry, screened by the BBC and RTÉ in late 1969 in response to Derry's importance as the scene of the civil rights protests and the first serious riots of ‘the Troubles’; and to talk of the ‘soul’ of Derry, as he did in John Hume's Derry and A city solitary, is indicative of the relationship between his thinking on Derry and Northern Ireland, and Plato's city/soul analogy.Footnote 74 Consequently, Ken Bloomfield's descriptions of Hume as the SDLP's ‘philosopher-king’ and as the Northern Irish politician ‘most inclined to think in grand conceptual terms and long timescales’, were remarkably apt.Footnote 75
In Hume's imagination, Derry contained a Protestant population fearful of living outside of the city's walls, where, they believed, a hostile native Catholic population dwelt. The ‘most powerful force preventing…growth’, he argued, ‘lay in the history of Derry itself’. He highlighted how the city ‘had always been a Protestant stronghold ever since the seventeenth century and had always been very English in outlook’.Footnote 76 Consequently, reasons ‘of defence…had tended to prevent the spread of Derry outside its compact well-enclosed site’.Footnote 77 For Hume, Northern Ireland likewise contained a Protestant Unionist majority scared of living without the security of partition between it and a predominantly Catholic and seemingly irredentist southern state. Hume's tendency to view Derry as a microcosmic Northern Ireland can be glimpsed again and again. He described his city as ‘a microcosm of the Irish situation’ in his Personal views.Footnote 78 In ‘Basic paradoxes of Unionism’, produced in October 1970 for his column in The Sunday News, he argued that the ‘decision to retreat behind the siege wall [in 1920]…cut the Northern Unionists off from the cultural mainstream’, highlighting a ‘continuing defensive mentality’ amongst them.Footnote 79 At the Cambridge Union in November 1975, he declared that loyalists had ‘sought to protect their rights…by building a siege wall around themselves’.Footnote 80
Thus, Breslin had the measure of Hume's political imagination in the late 1960s, arguing that Derry constituted ‘in the context of [Hume's] social and political philosophy, a perfect casebook situation upon whose solution depends the whole nature, quality and duration of the statelet known as Northern Ireland’.Footnote 81 In his history of Derry, Hume was not merely depicting how his city outgrew its walls owing to a post-Union, economic boom largely generated by his city having become drawn into the North Atlantic shipping trade.Footnote 82 He was, rather, demonstrating how the people of Northern Ireland could, and in his view inevitably would, outgrow the confines of partition peaceably as a result of social and economic progress.
II
‘Fraternité’ reflected a discourse on the concept of patriotism then evolving amongst Ireland's Catholic intelligentsia. As Enda Delaney has observed, in 1958 Dr William Philbin published an influential pamphlet Patriotism arguing for ‘what can best be described as a civic form of patriotism, based less on visceral and sentimental elements and concerned more with improving communal well-being and fostering economic progress’.Footnote 83 Philbin held the Chair of Dogmatic Theology at St Patrick's between 1936 and 1953, when he was appointed bishop of Clonfert.Footnote 84 Although having departed Maynooth when Hume arrived, it is clear that arguments Philbin advanced in Patriotism can not only be found in ‘Fraternité’, and subsequently within Hume's thought, but also within Ó Fiaich's history lectures.
A key argument that Hume advanced in ‘The Northern Catholic’ was that political leadership in Ireland had been ‘the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans’.Footnote 85 ‘Fraternité’ was certainly a much earlier attack on sloganized politics and hero-worship, Dubois standing in front of the smoking Bastille reflecting on the ‘jumbled, meaningless words: “Liberté…Egalité…Fraternité”’. So too was Patriotism: ‘Hero-worship in so far as it blinds us to human defects…must be checked and controlled.’Footnote 86 ‘We should scrutinize popular slogans’, Philbin continued, ‘and reject those that are indefensible no matter from whom they emanated.’Footnote 87 One of his main arguments was that Irish patriotism was highly emotional, blinding men to reason, thereby leaving them easy prey for ideologues. ‘“The herd instinct” and “mob psychology” are not mere names’, he insisted, they ‘are governing influences in communities that substitute emotion for reason.’Footnote 88 The same argument resides in ‘Fraternité’: a peaceful Dubois is swept away by Desmoulins's oratory and the passion of the mob.
Whilst staring at the Bastille, Dubois realizes that his belief that the Revolution would lift his children ‘out of their misery’ is a falsehood. Philbin's central argument was that the Irish needed to understand that constitutional change did not necessarily equate to social and economic prosperity:
receptivity to new ideas should not be confused with the childish impulse to throw away the whole framework of society…and to assume that radical change will bring something better. All human institutions are imperfect − including those that come by way of revolution…[we need to] rid our minds of any idea that there is something inherently selfish and mundane about ordinary productive work and that the highest service to one's country can only be thought of in military terms.Footnote 89
Hume's Dubois is the true patriot in this sense – until he is corrupted by the serpentine Desmoulins. Initially, Dubois does not dream of radical constitutional change: rather, he works hard, being ‘content to trundle his barrow’ so as to provide for his family, thus contributing to the economic life of his city. He discovers the futility of slogans, hero-worship, and violence the hard way. The Parisians storm the Bastille in order to liberate themselves: to escape into utopia. Yet they succeed merely in locking themselves into a far more terrible, dystopian reality. The Revolution does not rescue Dubois's children: it destroys them.
What one sees in ‘Fraternité’, then, is not merely a rejection of political violence, and the first identifiable manifestation of the consensual theme in Hume's intellectual biography. It is also an early incarnation of his long-standing argument that true Irish patriotism was about people ‘spilling their sweat and not their blood’.Footnote 90 Moreover, the story contains the germ of a key idea advanced in ‘The Northern Catholic’, the fundamental tenet of Hume's so-called ‘revisionist’ nationalism: nationalists needed to accept partition so that they could divert their energies into making a ‘constructive contribution on…the social and economic plane’:
It is this lack of a positive contribution and the lack of apparent interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe that the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and therefore unfit to rule…the Constitutional position… has too often been an excuse for inactivity.Footnote 91
So like Philbin, Hume was inverting the traditional Irish nationalist paradigm. For both men, economic and social prosperity achieved through toil would gradually precipitate positive constitutional change, as opposed to radical constitutional change, engineered through revolution, precipitating immediate social and economic prosperity. What makes this process of ideological inversion all the more intriguing is that evidently Hume and Philbin were responding to the fortieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. In ‘Fraternité’, for example, one detects an unwritten comparison between the way in which the Parisians viewed the Bastille as symbolic of an oppressive regime, and how the 1916 rebels barricaded themselves within Dublin's General Post Office for much the same reason. There is certainly a sense in which Desmoulins, who idealizes revolution, emerges from ‘Fraternité’ as a sort of French Patrick Pearse, the fervently Catholic ideologue and orator who, as Richard English has observed, was largely responsible for constructing that mode of spiritual, sacrificial, and overtly militaristic republicanism that fuelled the Rising.Footnote 92 No doubt Philbin also had visions of 1916 (and of European totalitarianism) in mind when highlighting the dangers of hero-worship, and of the ‘herd instinct’ and ‘mob psychology’.
Throughout his European history, Ó Fiaich pushed a perspective on true patriotism resembling Philbin's thinking. In Patriotism, the latter compared the stereotypical, militaristic Irish patriot with Cervantes's Don Quixote: ‘The most famous novel ever written tells of a Spanish gentlemen who foolishly romanticised physical combat as a result of unbalanced, uncritical reading…great heroism is not always found in spectacular exploits.’Footnote 93 Now consider Ó Fiaich's argument whilst lecturing on why Spain experienced severe financial difficulties during the reign of Philip II, despite its supremacy in Europe and its lucrative colonies:
It is hardly an injustice to the Spanish character to look on Don Quixote as not a bad mirror of it – courageous, adventurous, idealistic…despising patient toil in light of quick spectacular conquests, preferring noble failure to commonplace success. Give him an Empire to conquer, a crusade to fight for and he'll nobly do or die, but ask him to till his own back garden and he'll be on the rocks in a year.Footnote 94
The idea that Hume's thinking on Irish patriotism owed much to his studies under Ó Fiaich is reinforced by the way the former transcribed this passage. Hume's transcription also indicates that Ó Fiaich's reference to Quixote predates the publication of Patriotism (Hume transcribed this lecture in 1957), signifying that Philbin was articulating a discourse on patriotism evolving within the Irish church: ‘Quixote is typical Spanish [sixteenth-century] character. Courageous, adventurous but very impractical, no patience and choosing what offered hope of easy way, despising intrigue, taking line of chivalry, preferring noble failure to common place success…So Spain had remained an unworldly sort of country and people (like us).’Footnote 95 Much like Philbin then, Ó Fiaich pushed the idea that true patriotism was about undramatic toil, as opposed to heroic gestures and blood-sacrifice. Again, one senses an unwritten comparison here between Quixote and the theatrical Pearse.
It is therefore intriguing that in his thesis Hume demonstrated how a new form of materially orientated, civic patriotism emerged amongst Derry's Presbyterian community, precipitating the city's expansion. According to Hume, Presbyterians were the ‘dominant element in the business life of the city’.Footnote 96 ‘Responsible in the main for all the improvement we have been discussing’, he went on to highlight, ‘were Derry's middle classes…Good business men they were as the growth studied shows.’Footnote 97 This generation of Derry Presbyterian was, for Hume, more concerned with their own well-being – and that of their city – than with the divisive legacy of the Siege of Derry, and of the earlier Catholic revolt against the Protestant planters in Ulster in 1641. With ‘the increase of business within and the growth of new streets without’, he observed, ‘the agitation for more openings in the walls grew’.Footnote 98 ‘Development outside the walls’, he later contended, ‘marked the end of the old prejudice that it was not respectable to live there…Their defensive mentality was beginning to disappear.’Footnote 99
More striking still is that this generation of confident and entrepreneurial Derry Presbyterian mirrored the new breed of materialistic northern Catholic Hume identified in The Irish Times, months before submitting his thesis. ‘It may be that the present generation of younger Catholics in the north are more materialistic than their fathers’, he claimed, ‘their thinking is principally geared towards the solution of social and economic problems. This has led to a deep questioning of traditional Nationalist attitudes.’Footnote 100 So whereas, according to his thesis, Derry's Presbyterians expanded their city outside its walls to improve their social and economic condition, Hume believed that, inversely, his generation of northern Catholics was willing to throw off the historical prejudice of working inside the parameters of partition to do likewise.
‘The Northern Catholic’ again evidences Hume's tendency to view Derry as a microcosmic Northern Ireland and vice versa. Yet it also illustrates the way in which, whilst completing his thesis, he saw the outlook of northern Catholics as mirroring that once held by his city's Presbyterian community. Perhaps most importantly, ‘The Northern Catholic’ demonstrates how, in May 1964, Hume sensed the narrative of his thesis in the world around him. He seemed to believe that he was living his own history of Derry.
III
Ó Fiaich also pushed a distinctive perspective on patriotism in his lectures on early modern Irish history. For example, he argued that the ‘small rising of Sir Cahir O'Doherty [1608] has been given a patriotic halo which it hardly deserves and Sir Cahir has in death gained the mantle of a patriot which in life he never deserved’.Footnote 101 According to Ó Fiaich, O'Doherty's disloyalty simply enabled the crown to purge political opponents, and to confiscate huge tracts of land in Ulster to facilitate its policy of plantation.Footnote 102
Yet Ó Fiaich was eager to demonstrate how Irish Catholics could and did act in a patriotic manner during the seventeenth century. He emphasized how the most constructive strategy they could adopt within the framework of the Protestant British state was to demonstrate their loyalty. Describing the experience of the earls of Ulster in Rome after their flight from Ireland in September 1607, Ó Fiaich observed how Peter Lombard, (absentee) archbishop of Armagh, informed Hugh O'Neill that ‘he couldn't expect his support for any further Spanish invasions of Ireland – the only hope for the Church in Ireland…was to prove its loyalty to the King in civil affairs’.Footnote 103 Lecturing on the reign of Charles I, Ó Fiaich described how ‘the Anglo-Irish (Old English) were becoming alarmed at the prospect of further Plantations, and they were trying to convince the administration that though Catholics, they were loyal’.Footnote 104 Finally, dwelling on the first meeting of the General Assembly of Confederate Catholics in October 1642, Ó Fiaich highlighted how its members ‘swore their allegiance to the King and the laws of Ireland’, and that in ‘order not to infringe on the King's prerogative announced that it was not a Parliament, but merely a General Assembly’.Footnote 105
A similar theme can be discerned in Ó Fiaich's lectures on mid-sixteenth-century France. When he mentioned the Politiques, which he did frequently – the centrist political grouping one of the heroes of his European history – he was quick to summarize their philosophy. In his notebook, Hume described the Politiques as a ‘Catholic centre party’, which emerged in the early 1570s.Footnote 106 ‘They sought compromise’, he wrote: ‘These men valued the unity of the nation more than religion.’Footnote 107 Noting down the consequences of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in August 1572, Hume wrote how an internal ‘result was another religious war which led to the strengthening of the middle group the politiques – French and political before Catholicism’.Footnote 108 In his notes on the round of warfare precipitating the Peace of Monsieur in 1576, Hume wrote that there was little ‘serious fighting…but it witnessed the growth of the politiques – Catholics in religion but willing to compromise with Huguenots for peace and political reasons’.Footnote 109
These aspects of Ó Fiaich's history evidently exerted a powerful influence upon Hume's political imagination. His strand of so-called ‘revisionist’ nationalism can be situated within that tradition of Irish Catholic loyalism pioneered by the Old English, and subsequently encouraged by Catholic nationalist leaders such as Daniel O'Connell and John Redmond, both of whom Hume would have learnt about in Ó Fiaich's first-year course ‘Irish History: the nineteenth century’.Footnote 110 In ‘The Northern Catholic’, Hume certainly promoted an ideology akin to Catholic loyalism: ‘If one wishes to create a United Ireland by constitutional means then one must accept the constitutional position.’Footnote 111
This is not to say that Hume either genuinely believed in, or was advocating, sincere loyalty to the British monarch. He never engaged in such melodramatic displays of fidelity to Elizabeth II as those performed by O'Connell during George IV's visit to Dublin in 1821.Footnote 112 The SDLP actually boycotted the queen's visit to Northern Ireland in August 1977, Vanguard claiming that the party had thus ‘effectively barred itself for any future Northern Ireland legislature’.Footnote 113 That said, party leader Gerry Fitt subsequently informed Harold Wilson that their shunning of the occasion was ‘a great pity because the Catholics were not anti-Queen’.Footnote 114 Yet whilst sharing a flight to Strasbourg in 1987 the Rev. Dr Ian Paisley joked that he would be returning to London for the opening session of parliament to hear Hume swear his ‘oath of allegiance’.Footnote 115 Hume's good-natured (but resolute) response was ‘that the SDLP members…do not swear but “affirm” allegiance’.Footnote 116
Hume was hardly the epitome of loyalty. He opened the short-lived Assembly of the Northern Irish People, which met in Dungiven, Co. Derry, in late autumn 1971, by quoting Sir Edward Carson's threat to the British government in 1912, that if home rule was passed, he would form a provisional government of Ulster and did not ‘care tuppence if it was treason or not’.Footnote 117 In 1988, Hume was himself threatened, by near-hysterical MPs, that he risked being arrested for treason if he met with the Provisional IRA's Army Council.Footnote 118
Nevertheless, Roy Foster has observed how throughout the seventeenth century the ‘Old English continued to stake their position on the compatibility of Catholicism and loyalism’.Footnote 119 In the 1960s, Hume was thinking in similar terms. He was clearly advocating Catholic loyalism as opposed to a broader nationalist variant. After all, he was writing about ‘The Northern Catholic’, not the northern nationalist: ‘There…exists among them [Protestants] a real fear of Rome…[producing] discrimination on a widespread scale…[This] places the duty on all Catholics to do all in their power to remove it and to remove the disabilities under which their fellow Catholics suffer as a result.’Footnote 120 Alvin Jackson has also highlighted how O'Connell popularized ‘a form of intense Irish patriotism that was compatible with some of the central institutions of the British state’ and which ‘looked back to the restrained, genteel and loyal Catholic reformers of the late eighteenth century’.Footnote 121 The same might be said with regards Hume. Feeding off Irish history (he was also well schooled by Ó Fiaich in late eighteenth-century Ireland), he sought to evolve a mode of nationalism that was compatible with Northern Ireland, even if this ideology was pragmatic, lacking any real emotional attachment to partition. As Hume saw it, loyalty to the state would, paradoxically, precipitate true Irish unity.
It would also be wrong to assume that, especially in the mid-1960s, Hume was adverse to some form of constructive union between Great Britain and a united Ireland. Fascinatingly, essentially his thesis was a Unionist history: he showed how the Union of 1801 had worked for Derry's economy, not least because, in his view, it had urged ‘the Irish Society to take a closer interest in their Irish estates’.Footnote 122 In A city solitary, he also highlighted how it was partition, not the Union, that had crippled his city by cutting it off from ‘its natural Donegal hinterland’.Footnote 123 Later, in his Personal views, he argued that Irish home rule ‘would have led to a federation of the four [nations], which would have been ideal’.Footnote 124 It is perhaps also worth flagging how Hume's father had subscribed to Catholic loyalism of the Redmondite variety: he joined the Royal Irish Rifles in 1914 and served in France.Footnote 125
Furthermore, given Hume's education in European history under Ó Fiaich, and his schooling in French under Schild, the similarity between the concept of the SDLP and the French Politiques cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence. Both were centrist parties composed mostly of Catholics, preaching co-operation with Protestants for the sake of peace and national unity. The obvious counter-argument is that the SDLP was forged by six men, not one.Footnote 126 Part of its foundation myth, however, is that Hume sought to form a quintessentially Catholic party before committing to the more eclectic political grouping that morphed into the ambitiously secular SDLP in August 1970.Footnote 127 Was he trying to evolve a contemporary, Northern Irish version of the Politiques? Was Hume again trying to live a historical narrative?
That throughout his early political career Hume advocated a mode of Catholic loyalism is in fact relatively unsurprising, however: St Patrick's was established in 1795 to function as a wellspring of that ideology on the island. As Ian McBride has highlighted, it was ‘the French Revolution that convinced British statesmen that Ireland's Catholic hierarchy, for so long a potential source of subversion, might become a powerful stabilizing influence’.Footnote 128 It is ironic therefore, that in May 1974 the so-called Sunningdale Executive – arguably Hume's and the SDLP's greatest exercise in something like Catholic loyalism prior to the brokering of the Good Friday Agreement – was besieged successfully by a movement (involving a young David Trimble) channelling a mode of Ulster Protestant nationalism, the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike. The conclusion reached by a British civil servant reporting on the ‘State of the SDLP’, a little later, in January 1976, springs to mind: ‘a Martian would be justified in describing the SDLP as “loyalist” and the UUUC [United Ulster Unionist Council] as “rebels”’.Footnote 129
IV
Peter McLoughlin has contended that John Hume only became politicized during the mid-1960s: ‘Fraternité’ indicates that Hume was evolving a strand of political thought, whether consciously or unconsciously, during the mid-1950s, one which owed much to his undergraduate studies.Footnote 130 Gerard Murray has argued that Hume's long-standing belief that the problem of Northern Ireland could only be solved within a European framework was based on thinking formulated by the NDP: ‘Fraternité’ illustrates that the European dimension of Hume's thinking was extant in the mid-1950s.Footnote 131 McLoughlin has also claimed that Hume produced the ‘The Northern Catholic’ before having given any thought to entering politics.Footnote 132 That depends entirely upon the kind of politics. For a young, intelligent, and evidently ambitious Catholic in 1950s Ireland, the priesthood offered a far more obvious and effective route to political influence than party politics, especially in the North. As Owen Dudley Edwards has so frequently contended, there is every possibility Hume went to Maynooth to become a bishop, not a priest.Footnote 133
Sarah Campbell has insisted that scholarly preoccupation with Hume obscures key debates and tensions within the SDLP during its formative years.Footnote 134 Conversely, consideration of Hume's relationship with Maynooth can expose significant fault-lines within the fledging political super-group. According to Eddie McGrady, Fitt and Paddy Devlin took issue with Hume largely because of ‘this whole thing about academic and practical politics’, Fitt once describing Hume and Seamus Mallon (subsequently Northern Ireland's first deputy first minster) as ‘those f––king schoolmasters’.Footnote 135 One can understand Fitt's and Devlin's frustration with Hume's intellectual pomposity: few, if any, Northern Irish politicians have been brazen enough to claim that their personal credo was ‘Reason is great and will prevail.’Footnote 136 Such tension was evident during a meeting between the SDLP leadership and Frank Cooper, the permanent undersecretary of the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), in September 1973, during which Hume led the discussion on the Council of Ireland.Footnote 137 Its ‘institutions would work rather in the way of those of the European Community’, he theorized, and his party ‘saw the Council as being “evolutionary”’.Footnote 138 It did not raise ‘problems of sovereignty’ and the ‘Unionists would accept their proposals’.Footnote 139 Afterwards, Fitt approached Cooper ‘commenting that Mr. Hume's approach was based too much on “Jesuit logic”’.Footnote 140
It was a sentiment that Paisley would have endorsed; his wife Eileen denouncing Hume as a ‘political Jesuit twister’ during a heated exchange between her husband and the Derryman during the final session of the Constitutional Convention in March 1976.Footnote 141 Hume gazed upon contemporary Northern Ireland through the lenses of sixteenth- and eighteenth-century France, seventeenth-century Ireland, and nineteenth-century Derry. Yet with the arrival of Johannine Catholicism, the convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, and the spectre of a Catholic church modernized and resurgent, a historically literate and passionate ‘Reformation Protestant’ such as Paisley was obviously wary of an intellectually formidable ex-seminarian such as Hume owing to haunting visions of the Counter-Reformation.Footnote 142 His fears were no doubt fuelled by Hume's oft-stated conviction (one betraying his seminary training) that Paisley's church would ‘die’.Footnote 143 Paisley need not have fretted, however. If Roy Foster is to be believed, Vatican II helped catalyse the process by which the Reformation finally succeeded in Ireland.Footnote 144
Importantly, Hume produced his thesis against the backdrop of the Second Vatican Council, Barry White correctly observing how, in keeping with its reforming spirit, Hume infused A city solitary with an ecumenical quality, having the Rev. Brian Hannon, a Church of Ireland clergyman (and future bishop of Clogher), narrate the film.Footnote 145 Indeed, the film's opening shot betrays the trinity of intellectual influences which moulded Hume's thinking: Derry, history, and Catholicism. Naturally, there were conspicuous political manifestations of Hume's historical education within a Catholic seminary. After a meeting with him in Derry in July 1973, the NIO official J. N. Allen reported how Hume had argued that the ‘Cathedral City’ of Armagh, rather than Stormont, ‘would be a much better place for the inaugural meeting’ of the proposed power-sharing Assembly.Footnote 146 ‘The Unionists had suggested it in 1920’, Hume explained, ‘and the Prelates of the two main Churches could bless its deliberations.’Footnote 147
The relationship between Hume's political thinking and the history of Derry, especially the Siege of Derry, is worthy of more analysis than can be accommodated here. Whilst Ian McBride has explored the place of the Siege within Ulster Protestant mythology, little is known about how visions of that near-legendary engagement have informed the evolution of northern nationalism.Footnote 148 It is also true that in the history of Derry Hume and his fellow Nobel Laureate David Trimble (another keen student of European and Irish history) share a common intellectual hinterland.Footnote 149
The Platonic dimension of Hume's thought has also been exposed. His thinking on Irish unity was not only indebted to Ó Fiaich's history, but also Plato's The republic, a key theme of which is the necessity of a harmonious unity of city and soul: the ‘city may go on increasing so long as it can grow without losing its unity’.Footnote 150 To grasp the essence of Hume's political thinking, one must also appreciate his tendency to see the walled city of Derry as a mini-Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland as a scaled-up Derry. Via postgraduate research, he believed that he had identified a credible model of historical change: the people of Northern Ireland would outgrow partition just as his city expanded beyond its walls. Thus, in contrast to what Van der Essen taught Ó Fiaich, Hume concluded that, in the cases of Derry and Northern Ireland, liberty existed outside the enceinte. This provides further evidence of another key intellectual theme illuminated here: Hume's tendency to think in terms of historical inversions.
Oliver McDonagh suggested that the Irish problem ‘persisted because of the power of geographical images over men's minds’.Footnote 151 It is clear, however, that visions of the city of Derry moulded the imagination of one of Ireland's most influential political reconcilers. Furthermore, Hume is not the only architect of the peace process to have worked up his history and undergone a process of intellectual maturation within a walled, all-male, and, moreover, institutionalized environment: there is the case of a studious Gerry Adams confined within Cage 11 of Long Kesh Prison during the mid-1970s. It is also worth highlighting that, for reasons that are entirely understandable, history's ‘obvious ideological usefulness’ has intrigued Irish historians largely because it has troubled them.Footnote 152 They have tended to fixate on the ways in which visions of history have precipitated and sustained conflict. Yet given the relatively peaceable island in existence today, viewed alongside the ideas presented here, scholars could do worse than to consider the ways in which history has nourished consensual ideologies. This would certainly help redress that neglect of centrist themes hitherto characteristic of Irish historiography, and which has been highlighted by Alvin Jackson.Footnote 153
Hume's Derry background and seminary education may have been inspirational with regards his political ideology. Yet these influences constrained as much as they liberated his thinking. Breslin believed that being a Derryman led Hume ‘to misjudge consistently the strength of Protestant reaction, especially in Belfast’.Footnote 154 Fitt, from Belfast, depicted Hume as ‘“an inflexible fanatic” who saw everything in terms of Derry and could not take a wider view’.Footnote 155 Similarly, Cowling painted him as a ‘withdrawn, serious, studious man who identifies closely with the problems of his home town of Derry’.Footnote 156 Mallon has likewise described how he found it ‘hard to reconcile the breadth of his intellectual capacity, with the narrowness of his approach’.Footnote 157 If this discussion has demonstrated anything, it is that such reconciliation will only be precipitated via further careful consideration of Hume's intellectual relationship with Maynooth, history, and the distinctive social and physical geography of Derry.
