John Hume

John Hume (18 January 1937 – 3 August 2020) was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Hume served in the Parliament of Northern Ireland; the Northern Ireland Assembly including, in 1974, its first power-sharing executive; the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament. Seeking an accommodation between Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism, and soliciting American support, he was both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the republican embrace of "armed struggle". In their 1998 citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised Hume as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. For his own part, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.

Early life and education

Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie" (née Doherty), a seamstress, and Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker. He had a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal.

Hume was among the first to benefit from the 1947 Education Act. which in Northern Ireland "revolutionised access to secondary and further education". It provided him with scholarships, first to attend St Columb's College, a fee-paying grammar school, and then St Patrick's College, Maynooth. This was the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. Among his teachers was Tomás Ó Fiaich.