A peacemaker, now resting in peace, John Hume forged on against a “tsunami of abuse” after his secret meetings with Gerry Adams came to light.
Speaking in West Belfast on Monday, the former Sinn Fein leader revealed how they met in private for over a decade in a bid to find “an alternative way forward”.
And despite his “vilification”, Mr Hume “stuck with it”. Mr Adams said: “The peace process, I would like to think was his huge achievement.
“Although he has been ill for some time, I do think he had a sense of that, by persistence and by the way that he was prepared to look.
“This is sometimes put in quite simple terms. On the one hand you will hear that John Hume sacrificed his party and Sinn Fein were too crafty and all of that. That isn’t what this was about or what happened.
"He and I from our different perspectives agreed – and he was singularly against the IRA, let’s be clear about that – but he was a Derry man so he knew that republicans who were involved in armed struggle or supported armed struggle were serious.
“He may have thought they were, and he did think they were, totally wrong, but he knew they thought they were totally right. So the way to get at that wasn’t to have the stand-off – of communities like this being victimised and being, I suppose, demonised. You probably couldn’t have interviewed me on television for periods of that.
“When John bent his will along with me and others to find an alternative way forward – that’s what worked.
“And I also think to his great credit, that when the news broke about him meeting with me and he was the victim of a tsunami of abuse and of vilification – that he stuck with it.
"We must have met in secret and privately for over a decade against a background and foreground of terrible atrocities and other events and at the end of it all, it worked.
“And it worked not least because of John Hume – many others - but just because this is the sad day of his passing, let’s mark it that it would not have happened without John Hume or Pat Hume.”
