John Hume, a moderate Roman Catholic politician who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his dogged and ultimately successful campaign to end decades of bloodshed in his native Northern Ireland, died on Monday, the Social Democratic and Labour Party said. He was 83.
He died after a short illness, according to a statement released by his family.
“It seems particularly apt for these strange and fearful days to remember the phrase that gave hope to John and so many of us through dark times: We shall overcome,” his family said.
Mr. Hume, a former French teacher known widely for a sharp wit but rarely for rhetorical flourishes, rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become a towering figure in the grinding and oft-thwarted drive to end 25 years of “The Troubles,” as Northern Ireland’s strife was known.
In his campaign for peace, inspired by the example of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Hume employed a winning combination of public exhortation against the violence of the Irish Republican Army and secret diplomacy with its political leadership, sitting down for talks in his modest rowhouse over coffee. Deftly, and persistently, he enlisted the White House to help him reach his goal.
His efforts were recognized when he shared the Nobel with the Protestant leader David Trimble in 1998, the year of the Good Friday peace agreement, which crowned his commitment to ending the seething unrest that had claimed more than 3,000 lives.
A television poll in the Irish Republic in 2010 proclaimed him “Ireland’s Greatest,” ahead of prominent contenders like the rock star Bono. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI awarded him a papal knighthood.
Paradoxically, in bringing more radical Roman Catholic figures to the negotiating table — notably Gerry Adams, the head of the I.R.A.’s political wing — Mr. Hume undermined his own party’s appeal to voters. Battling poor health, he resigned in 2001 as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which he had led since 1979, without enjoying the high office that might normally reward an architect of historic change.
In 2004, he said he would no longer seek election to the European and British Parliaments, which he joined in 1979 and 1983, respectively. He gradually succumbed to dementia, and in late 2015, Pat Hume, his wife, political manager and mother of their five children, told the BBC that he was experiencing “severe difficulties.”
Throughout a career in Northern Ireland politics, where finger-pointing and recrimination amplified a drumbeat of bombings and killings, Mr. Hume stood as a voice of reason, counseling against the cycles of bloodshed, armed struggle and retaliatory violence between the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority.
“An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” he said, attributing the comment to Dr. King, the American civil rights leader for whom he professed great admiration.
Instead he advocated dialogue and reconciliation to still the furious conflict that pitted the I.R.A. against Protestant paramilitary groups and thousands of British Army soldiers. “We have to start spilling our sweat, not our blood,” he declared.
In the parlance of Northern Ireland, Mr. Hume was a “nationalist” whose dream of a reunited Ireland excluded the violent tactics embraced by “republicans,” like the I.R.A., with its armed fighters and its networks of financiers, bomb-makers and sympathizers in the region and in the United States. Rather, he foresaw a time when distinctions across Ireland’s divide would give way to peace and economic self-interest.
Such was Mr. Hume’s concern about multimillion-dollar funding for the I.R.A. by Irish Americans that he traveled frequently to Washington to convince American leaders, from President Jimmy Carter onward, that a majority of Northern Irish people rejected the I.R.A.’s violent methods. It was a message that culminated in the more active role in Northern Ireland adopted by President Bill Clinton.
In one of three of visits to the Clinton White House by Mr. Hume, Mr. Clinton lauded him as “Ireland’s most tireless champion for civil rights and its most eloquent spokesman for peace.” Back home, Mr. Hume had a parallel reputation as a man who did not suffer fools gladly.
“Question: What is the difference between John Hume and God?” one joke asked. “Answer: God doesn’t think he is John Hume.”
His most dramatic initiative played out in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, when he conducted secret peace talks with Mr. Adams at a modest rowhouse in the city of Derry, which those seeking to retain close ties to Britain refer to as Londonderry.
Over the years, the house itself was attacked several times by firebombers — some Protestants, others Catholic supporters of the I.R.A. — a token of the hazards and threats from both sides that persisted during the quest for peace. Several times in the mid-1990s, Mr. Hume was hospitalized for what he called “a case of nerves.”
Mr. Hume said the secret talks, over cups of coffee and glasses of Ballygowan mineral water, had begun in the early 1990s, a resumption of discussions dating back to 1988.
At the time, for many Britons and Northern Irish Protestants, Mr. Adams was a pariah with a reputed history as an I.R.A. commander, a role he has consistently denied. As president of Sinn Fein — the political wing of the outlawed I.R.A., which the British authorities and many others viewed as a terrorist organization — Mr. Adams was depicted by his critics as no more than a front for the “hard men” of violence. And in talking to him, Mr. Hume risked the accusation that he was treating with terrorists.
“One was a man of peace and the other a man of war,” the correspondent John Darnton wrote in The New York Times in 1994.
Mr. Hume’s essential achievement was to convince Mr. Adams that if the I.R.A. renounced violence, Sinn Fein could join peace talks from which it had long been excluded, gaining a yearned-for political legitimacy. The effort was part of a complicated international process. The British government had itself been conducting unpublicized back-channel contacts with Sinn Fein.
“Central to the discussions from my point of view was violence,” Mr. Hume said. “I kept asking for the reason for it. I had said publicly that the I.R.A. had been discussed as criminals and gangsters. I said I wish they were. If they were, we could have gotten rid of them in a fortnight. The problem was they believed in what they were saying.”
He added: “The whole objective was to bring about a total cessation of violence. We eventually agreed on that. Then the question was: How to get there?”
The contacts led to a “complete cessation of military operations” announced by the I.R.A. in 1994 — a critical steppingstone on the way to the 1998 peace accord, despite an I.R.A. bombing campaign in London in 1996 that shattered the cease-fire before it was restored.
Finally, in September 1997, Sinn Fein, representing the I.R.A., and the leaders of Protestant parties sat at the same negotiating table for the first time since Ireland was partitioned in 1922 into an independent Irish Republic in the south and the British-run province in the north. Mr. Hume dismissed widespread suggestions that, in fact, the I.R.A. had bombed its way to the peace table. Without the violence, Mr. Hume argued, Sinn Fein would have been admitted to the talks years earlier.
But the relationship came with a heavy political cost.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party had controlled about two-thirds of the Catholic vote, Sinn Fein one third. By mid-1997 Sinn Fein’s share had risen to about 40 percent. The trend continued. In the 2011 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, Sinn Fein won twice as many seats as the S.D.L.P. By helping win Sinn Fein a place at the peace table, Mr. Hume had hurt his own party, and many of its members resented him for it.
John Hume was born in Derry on Jan. 18, 1937, the eldest of seven children of Sam Hume, a shipyard riveter who lived for many years on state welfare, and Annie Doherty Hume.
In a memoir, “John Hume — Personal Views: Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland,” Mr. Hume described how his father took him to a Republican meeting in the late 1940s.
“They were all waving flags and stirring up emotion for the united Ireland and an end to partition,” he wrote. “When my father saw that I was affected, he put his hand gently on my shoulder and said, ‘Son, don’t get involved in that stuff,’ and I said, ‘Why not, Da?’ He answered simply, ‘Because you can’t eat the flag.’ That was my first lesson in politics and it has stayed with me to this day.”
He won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a grammar school for the small elite of middle-class Catholic professionals, and studied for the priesthood before switching to a degree course in French and history. In his 20s he taught French and became a leading figure in both the civil rights movement and the fledgling credit union movement.
In 1960, after three years of courtship, he married Pat Hone, a fellow teacher. At one point, alongside their teaching, the couple ran a modest smoked-salmon business.
As a politician with rising influence, Mr. Hume was instrumental in preparing the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985. The pact gave the Irish Republic, for the first time, a consultative role in the affairs of the North, but it also guaranteed that no change in the territory’s political status could be made without the consent of its Protestant majority. He remained close to leading political figures in the United States and was an energetic salesman for the territory, helping persuade companies to move there.
When Jean Kennedy Smith, the older sister of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, was appointed ambassador to the Irish Republic in 1993, Mr. Hume became one of her constant advisers. She responded by helping persuade President Clinton to end American sanctions against Sinn Fein and to support the inclusion of Mr. Adams and Sinn Fein at the peace talks.
A committed European, Mr. Hume believed that just as Western European borders were weakened to encourage trade, so could the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic be gradually eliminated as the economies of the two parts of the island became interdependent.
“I am a teacher,” he said. “You keep saying the same things over and over. Then you know you’re getting through when someone in a pub gives you back your own words.”
James F. Clarity, who died in 2007, contributed reporting.
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