As they lowered John Hume into his grave in the city cemetery, on a hill overlooking Derry with a spectacular view of the River Foyle below, his family, we are told, broke into song: 'We shall overcome, we shall overcome some day...'
Like many people during that period we had taken to sleeping at the back of the house with mattresses up against the windows, apparently to protect us from stray gunfire. That song, so redolent of the civil rights struggle in 1960s America, was being sung by the man President Clinton would decades later describe as our Martin Luther King. It is my first memory of John Hume.
It is a bleak, dark, low cloud day in November 1993 and I am in another cemetery in Greysteel. Thousands of mourners walk in silence to the Star of the Sea church, the only sound the muffled impact of shoes on tarmac. Amid the chaos I remember turning to my cameraman and saying ‘please God let this be a tragic accident, a gas explosion and not a planned attack’. Nine people were killed that day with children among the dead. Later, Gerry Adams would carry the coffin of one of the IRA bombers caught in the blast.
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