John Hume faced party pressure over focus on IRA distracting from SDLP interests

Then-SDLP leader John Hume failed to look after the interests of his party in the 1990s when he was trying to persuade the IRA to lay down its arms, senior party figures repeatedly complained.

During a meeting in the Irish Embassy in London in March 1995, the party’s deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, said he had had a “heart-to-heart conversation” with Hume, which he believed “had helped to clear the air between them”.

Saying that he had told Hume he had no wish to challenge him for the party leadership, he said he had made it clear the leader should ease up on his “hand-holding” of Sinn Féin.

Instead, Mallon said Hume – relations between the two were often difficult – should concentrate on the SDLP’s fortunes, though Mallon drily doubted Hume would “heed the advice”.

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SDLP MP Eddie McGrady had similar concerns about Hume’s focus on helping Sinn Féin, telling Hume he had to decide “which of the two parties he was leading”, the SDLP, or Sinn Féin.

[ John Hume drafted IRA ceasefire statement for Gerry Adams, according to ‘secret’ fileOpens in new window ]

McGrady said Sinn Féin was “infiltrating” his South Down constituency where it had barely existed before, though it took nearly a quarter of a century before it captured his Westminster seat – McGrady held it for 23 years.

Worried about Sinn Féin’s fundraising successes in the United States, one of Hume’s closest colleagues in Derry, Mark Durkan, urged that the SDLP should appointed someone in Washington to try to do the same.

Despite the fears expressed about the SDLP’s future by his colleagues, which have all come to pass in the years since, Hume remained committed to helping the Sinn Féin leadership and to keeping in close contact with them.

[ ‘They attempted to kill John – they attempted to kill his family’: John Hume, the IRA and decades of death threatsOpens in new window ]

He told senior Irish diplomat Seán Ó hUiginn that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had “put their heads on the line” to get an IRA ceasefire, and that “it was vital they should not be undermined”.