Brid Rodgers: IRA taking credit for John Hume’s legacy may push young people to see terrorism as their only option

Former SDLP deputy leader Brid Rodgers was speaking after the death of her former party leader, John Hume.

When Mr Hume was campaigning for civil rights for nationalists in the early 1970s, she said, the IRA were campaigning for ‘Brits out’ and a united Ireland. Those were very contrasting aims, she added.

”Sinn Fein and the IRA’s view was that unionists don’t have any rights to be here - ‘we are going to move them whether they like it or not, we are going to move them by force’.

”But that was counterproductive and once that violence took over it killed the real message, about reconciliation and opposition to violence. It then took John Hume another 30 years to get that message through.”

Some 66-70% of nationalists, she said, always voted for John Hume and the SDLP and against Sinn Fein, because they were against violence.

She added: “I think a younger generation now have been deliberately fed the notion that all the changes were brought about by violence.

“It is very dangerous because the more you peddle that idea, they are actually encouraging another generation who do not know all of that to go out and do the same thing all over again [a terrorist campaign].”

Former SDLP MLA Alban Maginnis agreed.

“There is a danger that John’s role is being lost in the minds of the younger generation,” he said.

All the major political initiatives in the peace process were the out workings of John Hume’s peaceful strategy, he said; power sharing in 1974, the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985, the IRA and loyalist ceasefires in 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

It is “absolutely right” that there is a serious danger in a younger generation growing up and wrongly believing that the IRA secured political changes for nationalists, he said.

But in fact the civil rights movement was a nonviolent movement which very successfully campaigned for nationalists, he said.

“Republicans started their violence in 1970 and that was antithetical to the civil rights movement; it created a reaction and overshadowed the civil rights movement aims.”

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