Hugh leaves a legacy

I was pleased to read in the Lurgan Mail the warm tributes to the late Hugh News.

I believe the greatest tribute was unwittingly paid by Sinn Fein’s Mr O’Dowd when he stated that “Hugh News held a different political ideology to me”.

Of course he did in those days.

Hugh never wavered from his fundamental principles.

I canvassed with him in a number of elections in the seventies and early eighties and witnessed him being ridiculed at certain doorsteps for his political ideology, namely that the path of politics and persuasion and not coercion by bomb and bullet was the way to Irish Unity, that a power sharing partnership of mutual respect within the North and between North and South was the only way to bring about the real unity of the people of Ireland.

His legacy will be that his tenacity and his argument for those principles have won out in the end.

Those who vehemently opposed his “political ideology” whether Ulster Unionist, DUP or Sinn Fein have now fully accepted it.

Thank you Hugh.