Leadership Quote by John Hume

“The violence had broken out in both sides” is doing a lot of political work in very few words: it spreads culpability across the field, drains heat from the question of who “started it,” and reframes the moment as a shared catastrophe rather than a partisan scorecard. In Northern Ireland’s context, that move isn’t moral relativism so much as a pragmatic precondition for peace. If you want negotiations, you need language that lets adversaries climb down without humiliation.

Then comes the pivot: “but our philosophy as a party was very, very clear.” The sentence turns from description to branding. Hume isn’t litigating incidents; he’s asserting an identity. The repetition of “very” reads like a verbal underliner, a way of performing steadiness when the surrounding reality is chaos. It’s also a subtle rebuke to audiences who equated constitutional nationalism with the armed campaign: he’s carving out the SDLP as the disciplined alternative, committed to non-violence and democratic politics, even while acknowledging the wider spiral.

The subtext is defensive and strategic at once. Defensive, because the era demanded constant disavowal; silence could be read as complicity. Strategic, because “philosophy” casts the party’s stance as principled rather than tactical, implying a moral architecture beneath everyday decisions. Hume’s rhetorical posture here is classic peacemaking: concede the ugliness without conceding your mandate, accept complexity without surrendering clarity. It’s the language of someone trying to make a future possible while speaking inside a conflict that punishes nuance.