Chaired by Sara Canning, board member of the John and Pat Hume Foundation, Mike Nesbitt MLA, UUP Leader and Minister for Health, will deliver an address on the theme of Building Common Ground at St. Mary’s University College.
Building Common Ground is a series of discussions on how we advance relationships in NI, on the island and between Ireland and Britain.
The Hume Foundation is grateful to Professor Peter Finn KSG, Principal of St Mary’s University University’s College, for hosting this discussion.
Find Mike Nesbitt’s full address below:
I suppose the first issue to address is why is a Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party standing on the Falls Road as a Trustee of the John and Pat Hume Foundation.
It is not, shall we say, the norm.
So, it’s certainly not abnormal for me to be on the Falls Road, or more particularly in this University College. There was a time when I was so often here for Féile an Phobail I thought I deserved a metal name badge. I have been a guest on other occasions of your Principal, Peter Finn.
That leaves the Hume bit. So, I spent a lot of my time as a broadcast journalist, BBC, then UTV. And having been born in this city in 1957, I was just in time to grow up in what we so euphemistically call our Troubles. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I interviewed politicians whose narrative was “Woe is me! This is a horribly divided country and it’s all Themuns fault”. The exception was John Hume, who replaced the negative language of division, with the positivity of Diversity.
To quote from John’s Nobel Lecture when he and David Trimble were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998:
“difference is an accident of birth and it should never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity.”
4 years later, in 2002, he said this:
“Our societies are also more diverse than ever before, ethnically, culturally, religiously and also in terms of choices of lifestyle”. Arguably ahead of his time – again!
And this
“If we want to avoid barbarism, we must recognise, accept and celebrate the fact of human diversity. We are all different. We all have multiple economic, social, cultural and political identities. Some of these identities coincide, others are cross-cutting even within individuals.”
So, if he were here today, I think John Hume would say there’s nothing to be surprised about to see an Ulster Unionist Leader on the Falls Road in west Belfast speaking as a Trustee of the Hume Foundation.
The positivity of the diversity message can be summed up in one word, as far as I am concerned, and that word is HOPE.
I’m going to talk personally about HOPE through three examples – two days in my little life when Hope peaked, one for me, the other for all of us – but first one when it slumped.
That horrible day was the 25th of January 1973. That was the day the IRA blew up Alfred Nesbitt & Company Limited. Alfred was my grandfather, and the business was a Linen Manufacturers, in the linen quarter in Belfast. Grandad has passed the business on to his two sons by this stage – and it was expected I would grow up to be the third generation to run it. Dad was 49 years of age when the business burnt. In the moment of the explosion, every certainty in his life disappeared – he was brought up to be the second generation. But every responsibility remained – he still had a wife and three young children and a car and a house to support. But suddenly, no regular income stream. No monthly salary. And as IT turned out, no way to get the business back up and running.
A day when certainties – and Hope – disappeared.
A Couple of years later, I was studying English Literature at university and I read this in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens:
“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
I think that is the story of our Troubles – thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens who experienced memorable days because they got caught up in our conflict – got injured, saw loved ones killed, had their livelihoods taken away – because of a memorable day that wrapped them in chains of thorns.
I wonder – have you experienced your memorable day yet? The day that changes your life – that shapes your future?
Mine came around the same time as the bomb. I went from primary school to big school with the reputation of being something of a dunce, to use the language of the day. In any given academic test, you could bet the ranch I would come 23rd out of 24. I couldn’t sing or play a musical instrument, I didn’t have the talent to make any of the sports teams, and the most embarrassing bit was I couldn’t swim – which was embarrassing because if you could swim the school let you wear your own trunks – but if you couldn’t you were forced to wear a red Borat-style mankini.
The teachers had given up on me, my peers had given up on me. My parents probably had too but were too polite to say so.
Then, one wet Wednesday afternoon in Winter, it rained so hard, the sports pitches were flooded, and we were sent on a run round the pavements than bordered the school grounds. And who knew? I could run! One teacher signed me up for the Athletics Club, but another sat me down and said, “if you can do so well out there, surely there’s a classroom in here where you could do well.” It was the first time any adult – and figure of authority – gave me reason to believe that maybe my natural position in life did not have to be 23rd out of 24.
He gave me hope.
I do not want this to sound boastful, but it is a fact that because of that memorable day, having arrived in big school 23rd out of 24, I left with an Irish Schools Athletics vest in one hand and a ticket to Cambridge University in the other.
HOPE
The other memorable day takes me into politics. I first got interested in politics the day the family business was bombed. I wanted to understand why we were doing what we were doing to each other. And watching the impact on my father gave me a fascination with the human cost of conflict.
So I ended up as a broadcast journalist, covering the conflict and the peace negotiations that culminated in the 1998 Agreement on the 10th of April that year.
First point – the talks were supposed to end on Thursday the 9th of April. Senator George Mitchell was chairing the negotiations, and he wanted home for Easter. So as the clock ticked through midnight into Good Friday, I sensed it was going to be a momentous day – either because I would be reporting an historic deal, or that 700 days of talks had ended in monumental failure.
Around 2:00am, I drove home from where the talks were happening, to freshen up – shower, change of clothes for the overtime. When I stuck my head round the bedroom door, I was hit by a tidal wave of emotion, because there were my two sons, aged 3 and 10 months, lying peacefully sleeping with their mother. The emotion was over the prospect of peace – of these two boys growing up in the same city as me – a city I love – but in a totally transformed atmosphere – no threat of guns or bombs or back doors being broken down – no days when your mum would tell you that you couldn’t go into town because it was too dangerous – no waking up to news of the latest atrocity.
It was HOPE.
Believe it or not, a measure of that change was thinking when my boys were older, they might say “Dad, there’s a new restaurant or pub on the Falls Road. Fancy giving it a go on Friday?”
That didn’t happen but I mentioned this at a Féile a few years and two women came up to me after my remarks and told me the Glider has changed things. They often get the Glider over to Ballyhackamore in east Belfast, have a coffee and get the Glider home.
That makes my heart sing.
The moment back on Good Friday 1998 when I saw my family in bed is the moment I stopped being a journalist and became a citizen of this place – a citizen who wants better for all our young people, who wants everyone to have a memorable day, but a memorable day that wraps them in a chain of gold and roses.
I call it a Prosperity Agenda.
Prosperity isn’t just about money, but being financially secure is important, having a few quid in your back pocket come the weekend can be very liberating. It’s more about what the Americans so wisely referred to in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, when they wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
For me, there are five elements to that statement: Equality, Rights generally, the Specific right to Life, the Specific right to Liberty and the right to do what you need to do to be happy – in other words, creating the circumstances where you – as an individual – can wake up feeling life is good, get out of bed with a sense of purpose, because you have things to do that you want to do – stressing the phrase “want to do”. When you go to bed with a sense of satisfaction – or frustration that things didn’t go your way today, which feeds the determination to do better tomorrow.
That’s not to say there are no obstacles in your way – but it does mean the hurdles you have to jump are no higher or more difficult than the next person.
It means you feel cherished, that your family, your community and your Government wants you to succeed – and that’s not something that always happens – not just here but anywhere.
Look at how divisive American politics has become. Or British politics, with last week’s local government and other results. I have to say it would be quite the challenge to sit down with Donald Trump or Nigel Farage and try to find common ground.
When I was growing up, international politicians used to encourage our leaders to share spare, sit down with one another and find common ground. Two years ago – 2023 – I was in the United States marking the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Agreement. One event was a debate run by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. The NCAFP is the body that got Gerry Adams to the United States for the first time in 1994.
That was the time President Bill Clinton controversially gave Gerry Adams his first visa to visit the USA – a visa limited by time and geography – 48 hours in New York. It was so controversial Prime Minister John Major stopped talking to President Clinton for two days.
The conference was supposed to hear from the leaders of the five main local parties – Jim Molyneaux of the Ulster Unionists, Ian Paisley of the DUP, John Hume for the SDLP, the Alliance’s John Alderdice and Gerry Adams. But when Adams got the visa, the two unionist leaders withdrew from the conference. Not only that, but they also cancelled their flights.
I covered the event for Ulster Television and the mood in America was the unionists had committed an act of extreme self-harm. Who walks off the pitch and gives their opponents a free hit? So debating at the NCAFP was closing a circle for me. I sat with Mary Lou McDonald, Colum Eastwood, Naomi Long and others. While we had our moments of disagreement – tension if you prefer – the Americans were amazed we even agreed to share the same space. They said they couldn’t get their politicians to do that anymore.
If you are only prepared to enter a room full of people who think the same way you do, we are not going to make a lot of progress. If you do not have the confidence to walk into a room and say, for example, “I am a unionist, here’s what I think” and importantly, explain why, you have a problem.
That, by the way, is why I think Sinn Féin made a mistake in not going to Washington this March. I know Donald Trump said he was unaware of the boycott, which of course speaks volumes about its impact – but I spoke to Republican representatives who were angry. “After all we have done for them” they said, “When we think of the fundraising we have undertaken” “the influence we have granted them” “and this is what they do to us”.
I wonder what Irish nationalists are going to do next year, because St Patrick’s Day became St Patrick’s week in Washington a long time ago. Some say it’s now St Patrick’s season! And other nations are very jealous – France, Germany Italy, European nations with huge ethnic blocks in the USA wondering why we get such unprecedented access on Capitol Hill and the White House. If we lose it, we’ll never get it back.
And this is the time to make more of our connections – of the impact of the two great waves of emigration from this place, the Ulster Scots in the 1600s and the Irish Americans a couple of hundred years later. Because 2026 is the 250th anniversary of American Independence. Three Ulstermen were among the 52 people who signed that document, another printed the first copy. People from these shores produced American Presidents, industrialists, creatives, soldiers. Our impact on how the USA developed is unmatched internationally and next year is an unprecedented opportunity to celebrate that fact.
I find it extraordinary that people resent and resist immigrants coming here to make a home when so many of our forebearers did exactly that around the world, not least in the United States.
But our history is not always happy and glorious. I am going to finish with two thoughts, one about the past and the other about what might lie ahead.
In terms of the past, I can do no better than quote another Nobel Laureate. In his lecture David Trimble said this:
“Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”
I can understand how creating a country with a built-in majority of unionists was deeply frustrating to nationalists. You could have a Stormont election every month – Unionists were always going to win. And the fact is, nationalists by and large decided they were not going to play that game. And by and large unionists could have done more to reach out to their nationalist neighbours. That does not justify a single death. Nobody needed to die for us to get where we are today.
The fact is majoritarianism does not work here. Consociational government – power sharing – is the only way. Unionists – or most of us – realise we cannot govern this place without the active support of nationalists and republicans. Nationalists and Republicans – or most of them – realise they can no longer describe this place as a failed, ungovernable statelet.
Here’s the Hope.
For the first time, everyone – unionists, nationalists and republicans – sense the need to Make Northern Ireland Work. Our motivations may be different, but that’s no obstacle to make this place function for the benefit of all.
Unionists have always wanted to make Northern Ireland work – to justify partition. Nationalists haven’t. But when was the last time you heard a senior nationalist politician describe this place as a “failed, ungovernable statelet”? If you are the lead party of government, it’s not a sentiment you are likely to endorse. Especially if you are looking forward to a Border Poll and the potential for constitutional change. If you are voting in Dublin, or Galway, or Wexford or Limerick, what’s attractive about voting to adopt a failed, ungovernable statelet of 1.9 million people, people you don’t know or particularly like – and who will require thousands of your tax Euro to survive?
I am nearer the end of my political career than the beginning. I want to dedicate my remaining time to delivering that Prosperity Agenda, for all our citizens. The decision on our constitutional future does not belong to me. It might fall to my children – or maybe to theirs.
Those children, now 30 and 27, the ones I got so emotional about the day of the Agreement – now live in Birmingham and in Bath. They left not because they particularly wanted to, but because they did not sense they had opportunities if they stayed here.
My measure of success is creating the circumstances where young people like yourselves leave here only because they want to – not because they feel they have to.
I am tired of hearing about the potential of this place. I want to turn potential to reality – for you, for your peers and for everyone.