John Hume: In His Own Words

John Hume is regarded as the key architect of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. This book collects extracts from Hume's key speeches, articles and interviews, and adds a contextual narrative. The selected texts chronicle his entire career, covering his entry into public life in the early 1960s through the Credit Union, the Derry Housing Association, the civil rights movement, his first election to the Northern Ireland Parliament, the foundation of the SDLP, his influence over successive Irish governments, and the various initiatives aimed at ending the violence and achieving an acceptable agreement. Together, these texts provide a comprehensive overview of Hume's political thoughts, comments on critical events and developments, and his proposals for resolving the Northern Irish conflict. The texts reveal Hume's commitment to human rights, his implacable opposition to violence as a means of addressing conflict, his belief that what he regarded as the fundamentally flawed arrangements of 1920-1 (which had led to the establishment of the Northern State) had to be replaced with a much wider and more comprehensive agreement involving the British and Irish governments. As well as being of interest to the general reader, the book is a valuable resource for scholars researching the Northern Irish conflict and, in particular, John Hume's transformative influence on the development of Irish and British attitudes and policies, as governments grappled with the problems arising from the troubled relationships within and between the two islands. (Subject: History, SDLP, Good Friday Agreement, Irish Studies, Memoir, North Ireland & UK, Politics]