John Hume KCSG (18 January 1937 – 3 August 2020) was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Hume served in the Parliament of Northern Ireland; the Northern Ireland Assembly including, in 1974, its first power-sharing executive; the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament. Seeking an accommodation between Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism, and soliciting American support, he was both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the republican embrace of "armed struggle". In their 1998 citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised Hume as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. For his own part, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.

Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie" (née Doherty), a seamstress, and Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker. He had a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal.

Hume was among the first to benefit from the 1947 Education Act. which in Northern Ireland "revolutionised access to secondary and further education". It provided him with scholarships, first to attend St Columb's College, a fee-paying grammar school, and then St Patrick's College, Maynooth. This was the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. Among his teachers was Tomás Ó Fiaich.

Ó Fiaich's colleague, Monsignor Brendan Devlin recalls that the future cardinal and Primate of All Ireland turned his student (with whom he spoke in Irish) towards the local history of Ulster. Devlin believes that, being a Derry man Hume "didn't need much pushing".

You begin to ask questions ... how did this come around. I grew up in a city surrounded by battlements. Everything inside the battlement was Protestant and everything in the slums was Catholic. Is this normal in the city? Is this a normal city? And if you have any brains at all you begin to find out it is not. You know, it's not normal and the government of the city is gerrymandered. My crowd is getting no show at all. There must be a reason for this. And, of course, John got into all that.

Hume did not complete his clerical studies but graduated in 1958 with a degree in French and history. In 1958, he returned home to his native Derry, where he became a teacher at his Alma mater, St Columb's College, later, in 1964, earning an MA from Maynooth with a thesis exploring the conditions that drove Derry's principal export in the 19th century, emigrants.

In 1960, aged 23, Hume helped establish the Derry Credit Union, the first cooperative community bank in Northern Ireland. Pooling their resources, working people were able to create a low-interest alternative to moneylenders and pawn shops. Such was the success of this exercise in what he represented as "practical Christianity" (and as "Catholic in origin"), that within four years Hume had become the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions, a role in which he served until 1968. He was later to remark that of all the things he contributed to in his life, he was proudest of his engagement with credit unions, no movement having done "more good for the people of Ireland, north and south".

In 1963, drawing on his Maynooth thesis research, Hume wrote a script for a television documentary on Derry, "A City Solitary", that was broadcast on both the BBC and RTÉ. It persuaded The Irish Times to open its pages to the "first considered statement" of Hume's political views