Leadership Quote by John Hume

Hume’s sentence works because it’s doing two jobs at once: autobiography as evidence, and understatement as indictment. “I grew up in Derry, of course” sounds conversational, even offhand, but the “of course” is a quiet power move. It signals that his authority on the subject isn’t ideological posturing; it’s lived experience. He isn’t arriving with theory. He’s reminding you that his politics started as geography.

Then he pivots: “Derry was the worst example…” That “worst” lands like a verdict, not a slogan. Hume doesn’t need to list grievances in this moment; he compresses them into a single superlative that invites the listener to supply the record: housing allocation skewed by sectarian control, gerrymandering that rigged local government, job discrimination that made daily life feel pre-decided. Derry (or Londonderry, depending on who’s speaking) is itself a contested name, and Hume’s choice to say “Derry” is already a declaration of belonging inside a political argument.

The subtext is strategy. By framing the conflict around “discrimination” rather than tribal destiny, Hume shifts the moral center of Northern Ireland from ancient hatred to solvable injustice. It’s a politician’s move with a civil-rights cadence: diagnose the system, not the people. Coming from the architect of constitutional nationalism and later a Nobel laureate, the line also reads as an insistence that peace talks and power-sharing weren’t abstractions. They were answers to a hometown that had become a case study in what happens when a state distributes citizenship unevenly.