John Hume would have been ‘frustrated’ and ‘appalled’ by Stormont impasse and lack of socio-economic delivery
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00:00 Thanks for what you said about John Hume, Chairman.
00:03 I think you're absolutely right.
00:04 Way back in the mid '60s, he was plotting a path
00:09 to what ended up becoming the Good Friday Agreement.
00:11 He recognized the principles that we
00:13 had to competing identities, to competing nationalities.
00:17 It needed to be understood, and we needed to work together.
00:21 You had to internationalize the problem in order to fix it.
00:26 And you asked me to try and put myself in John's shoes.
00:30 As somebody who is the MP for Foyle and leader of the SDLP,
00:35 that's something I have been trying to do for a long time.
00:38 And of course, never measuring up,
00:40 because it is impossible to measure up
00:43 to what John was able to achieve.
00:45 And thank God for him.
00:47 I think what John and the SDLP, and of course,
00:50 the other parties who eventually agreed with that analysis,
00:56 achieved was they gave us the opportunity
00:58 to do our politics in a democratic way.
01:00 They gave my generation the opportunity
01:03 to live in peace, which is no small feat.
01:08 I think they ended the Anglo-Irish conflict
01:11 that had raged for centuries.
01:13 And that's something I think we can't forget.
01:16 What would he think today?
01:17 I think he'd be very frustrated.
01:19 But I think he'd still be very happy that he
01:21 took those risks for peace.
01:24 Because if nothing else was achieved out
01:26 of the Good Friday Agreement, peace was achieved.
01:29 And I don't think we're ever going back,
01:30 despite some of the challenges that we face.
01:34 And we've seen not so long ago there is still
01:36 a very real threat there by some people who just can't get
01:39 on board with the people of Ireland
01:44 and want to still turn their face
01:45 against the democratic wishes of all the people of our country.
01:51 But peace was achieved.
01:52 Peace is secure, in my view.
01:55 It always has to be minded.
01:56 We have to work it.
01:58 He would be frustrated, though, I think,
02:00 that the principles that underpinned the Good Friday
02:03 Agreement were, I think, about us all working in partnership,
02:08 us working the common ground every day,
02:10 us not walking away when things got difficult.
02:14 And I think that would frustrate him,
02:15 the fact that we had 3 and 1/2 years when Sinn Féin walked
02:19 away.
02:20 We've had what have we had now, over a year,
02:22 anyway, since the DUP walked away.
02:26 And the whole point was you had to compromise and work
02:30 the common ground and do that every day.
02:33 So when you didn't get what you wanted,
02:35 you weren't supposed to just walk away and pull
02:37 the whole edifice of government down.
02:38 The idea that the first response almost
02:42 is to pull the edifice, the very structures of government down,
02:48 I think would appall him.
02:51 And I also think he would have been very frustrated
02:54 that we didn't use--
02:56 even when the Assembly and the executive were up and running,
02:59 we didn't properly use those institutions
03:01 to change people's lives.
03:02 Because John was a social democrat
03:06 as much as he was anything else.
03:07 He was driven by--
03:10 I think we're still driven by that--
03:13 by a real desire and zeal to lift people out of poverty
03:17 and to give them opportunity.
03:19 And that's where the civil rights movement came from,
03:23 which the SDLP grew out of, was this need
03:26 to get rid of an old corrupt government at Stormont that
03:31 was keeping people down economically.
03:34 I mean, he always said our problems are economic as much
03:38 as they're anything else.