Hume, John

Hume, John

(born Jan. 18, 1937, Londonderry, N.Ire.) Leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland from 1979 to 2001 and corecipient with David Trimble of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1998. A schoolteacher, Hume became a Roman Catholic leader in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was elected to the parliaments of Northern Ireland (1969), Europe (1979), and Britain (1983). A moderate, he condemned the use of violence by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the late 1980s he attempted to persuade the IRA to abandon the armed struggle against Britain and enter democratic politics. He risked his personal safety to engage in sometimes secret dialogues with leaders of Sinn Féin, the IRA's political wing, and he played a leading role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, the multiparty peace accord between unionists and nationalists reached in April 1998. Elected to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in June, he resigned his seat two years later because of ill health.