Leadership Quote by John Hume

“Total ghettoization” is a deliberately incendiary phrase: it drags what could be filed away as bureaucratic policy into the moral register of segregation and social engineering. John Hume isn’t just accusing opponents of bad planning; he’s alleging intent. The charge is that power didn’t merely tolerate deprivation but actively designed it, using public housing as a lever to box a population into a controllable geography.

The mechanics he lays out are chillingly mundane: councils control zoning, housing allocation, and the distribution of services. If you decide where people live, you quietly decide how they vote, whom they organize with, how easily they can access jobs, and how visible their grievances are. Hume’s subtext is that “local government” can function as an instrument of coercion without looking like one. That’s why the language lands: it exposes the political strategy hidden inside administrative choices.

Context matters. Hume is speaking from the Northern Ireland reality where housing and local council boundaries were not neutral. They were historically entangled with sectarian advantage, discrimination in allocation, and the creation of homogeneous districts that could be policed, neglected, or mobilized at will. His rhetorical move is to reframe the conflict away from ancient hatreds and toward structural incentives: control the map, and you control the people. It’s a line aimed at puncturing the comforting myth that inequality is accidental, replacing it with a harder claim that it can be engineered - and therefore dismantled.