Reputation
Hume is credited with being the thinker behind many of the recent political developments in Northern Ireland, from the power-sharing Sunningdale Agreement to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Belfast Agreement. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 alongside the then-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble.
When David Trimble became First Minister it was expected that Hume would take the role of his deputy, being leader of the second largest party, the SDLP. Instead this role was handed to Seamus Mallon, also of the SDLP. Some political journalists cited a bad working relationship between Hume and Trimble despite collecting the Nobel prize with him.
On his retirement from the leadership of the SDLP in 2001 he was praised across the political divide, even by his longtime opponent, fellow MP and MEP, the Rev. Ian Paisley. Hume holds the Tip O'Neill Chair in Peace Studies at the University of Ulster, currently funded by The Ireland Funds.
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Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““What have I earned for all that work,” I said,
“For all that I have done at my own charge?
The daily spite of this unmannerly town,
Where who has served the most is most defamed,
The reputation of his lifetime lost
Between the night and morning....””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)