John Hume

Every child growing up will look to their parents, my mother and my father. My grandmother lived with us. I picked up quite a bit of family lore and history from her, which was interesting.

In coming to that agreement, my party had a clear philosophy throughout. In Northern Ireland, we should have institutions that respected the differences of the people and that gave no victory to either side.

The violence had broken out in both sides, but our philosophy as a party was very, very clear.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

I was grateful for the opportunity to make a difference. The political violence really started in 1970-1971. The political difficulties start a little bit beyond that.

Total ghettoization, because they were in charge of public housing, the local council, and they deliberately located people in a ghetto situation in order to ensure that they maintained control.

I never thought in terms of being a leader. I thought very simply in terms of helping people.

In working class districts, you had several families living together in the one house, and it was very difficult to get a house, because the politicians who controlled housing were doing so in a very discriminatory fashion.

I grew up in Derry, of course, and it was - Derry was the worst example of Northern Ireland's discrimination.

These are the influences that everybody has. Some individuals might stand out because of one thing or another, but whether one's perception as a child of what was important or not is accurate, I don't know.

That's the strategy that myself and my party have pursued and are pursuing.

The only thing I shall talk about is my sporting achievements at school. My primary sporting achievement at school was that I dodged games for two complete years and was well through the third year before they discovered that I had completely avoided all games.