An Irishman’s Diary about John Hume and the art of persuasion

The recent news about John Hume’s memory problems reminded me poignantly of an occasion, back in the late 1990s, when I was sent north to interview him.

Memory was a sub-theme of the interview, because among the subjects I had to broach was his habit of endlessly repeating certain phrases about the peace process, often to the despair of journalists.

Strategy

And I broached it as delicately as I could, but he quickly interrupted. “You mean my single transferable speech?” (as indeed it had become known), he asked. Then he explained how, far from being a symptom of advancing age, this had always been a deliberate strategy, informed by his early years as a teacher. In the classroom of difficult students that was Northern

Ireland

, he knew, you had to say certain things over and over again before they were absorbed, especially by the rowdy kids down the back.

Certain mantras

So at the risk of boring those who were professionally required to listen, he consciously repeated certain mantras – about an “agreed Ireland”, “uniting people, not territory”, and so on, until he heard them quoted back to him by “the man in the pub”.

As we know now, it worked.  "Humespeak" became one of the North's dialects, spoken fluently by Gerry Adams and many others who took it up late in life. It was spoken by press people too, of course, sometimes unwittingly.

I’d always assumed the phrase “single transferable speech” was the invention of a cynical journalist. But no. That was also coined by the headmaster, or so he told me.

I said earlier that I’d been “reminded” of this event recently.

But that’s not quite true, because for reasons separate from the interview itself, I’ll never succeed in forgetting it, without some kind of counselling.

Nissan Sunny

I had driven up to Greencastle that night in my first car – an ageing and neglected Nissan Sunny, by then long overdue at the scrapyard.

It had a dent in one of the doors, the exhaust was rattling, and it badly needed a wash.  Worse, it was beginning to labour noisily on hills. But I’d run out of time to do anything about these problems before leaving for Donegal.

And when I arrived there – somehow – and drove down the lane where the Humes lived, I parked deliberately a distance away from their gate, so that my embarrassment on wheels would not be visible.

Bad as the outside of the car was, it had not even occurred to me yet that my interviewee would see the inside of it. But no sooner had we made our introductions than he suggested we adjourn to a restaurant in the village and continue the conversation there.

A lift

Now the village was some distance away, and Hume was recovering from surgery. So two things were obvious: (1) we couldn’t walk; and (2) he couldn’t drive. Despite which, as I heard myself utter the strained words “Will we take my car?”, I still desperately hoped the answer would be no.

It wasn’t. Moments later, the Nobel prize-winner and modern-day Parnell was settling into my passenger seat, while the engine whined and the exhaust rattled and I prayed silently we’d make it back up the hill to the road.

But now, with some distress, I was also noticing the inside of the car – the rubbish; the dried-in traces of baby emissions; the general impression that somebody had been living in it. And almost perspiring from the shame, I did the only thing I could – made an all-embracing but fleeting apology, then changed the subject to more important things, such as war, peace, and George Mitchell.

In fairness to my passenger, he did a very good impression, then and on the way back later, of being in a new, or recently valeted, Rolls Royce.

Advice

So affable was he that, by the time we parted, I was flattering myself that the quality of the company had distracted him from the state of the transport. Then he issued a farewell caution. “You might want to get that car looked at,” he said, “or it’ll leave you in the lurch somewhere”.

As so often, he was right.  His words couldn’t have been more prescient, in fact, unless “the Lurch” had been a village in west Tyrone. Instead, it was Newtownstewart the car left me in, an hour later. But on a Saturday night in Tyrone, that as close to the lurch as you can get. I had to ring my sister, 40 miles away, to get a lift home.