Steinbeck Festival Explores John Hume Legacy with Best-selling Author Stephen Walker

Limavady’s John Steinbeck Festival will host two of Northern Ireland’s most famous faces in political journalism at the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre on Friday, February 2 for ‘Mark Carruthers In Conversation with Stephen Walker’.

Stephen Walker will be most familiar to the audience as the eminent political journalist, appearing on our screens for 34 years as an investigative reporter with BBC Spotlight and former political correspondent with BBC Northern Ireland.

He has now embraced a new phase of his career as a best-selling author and will discuss his new book, ‘John Hume: The Persuader’, with renowned presenter, Mark Carruthers.

Stephen is looking forward to bringing a new insight into the man behind the headlines to the Limavady event, which has already visited Bangor, Downpatrick, Coleisland, Belfast, Ballymena and Armagh.

“I find politics fascinating, I find people fascinating and that is one of the reasons that I wrote the Hume book - I found John Hume to be a fascinating character, who had lived many lives before he became an active politician,” Stephen said.

“People think of John Hume as a politician but there are lots of parts to the Hume story which are not as well known.”

“There will be some surprises – I hope that people will come away feeling that they learnt a few things about John Hume that they didn’t know.”

Prestigious presenter, Mark Carruthers, who will interview Stephen Walker, originally comes from Limavady and is becoming a notable fixture of the annual Steinbeck Festival, having previously interviewed famous Northern Irish celebrities such as Martin O’Neill.

Stephen expresses his excitement about appearing at the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre as part of the Steinbeck Festival:

“I am really looking forward to Limavady, which is Mark Carruthers’ home town, so it is particularly special.

“I know Mark has fond memories of Limavady and loves to come back, so it is really nice that it is on Mark’s home patch.

“I am excited that it is part of the Steinbeck Festival, which is going from strength to strength.

“It is fantastic that the links between John Steinbeck and Limavady are being put into the public domain and people every year are learning more about those links.

“The story is being preserved and built on every year and people want to support the festival year upon year."

Stephen expects a lively discussion and some interesting input from the audience during the event:

“I hope it will be entertaining, I hope we will have the odd laugh, and I hope that people who have burning questions will have the opportunity to ask those questions!

“Inevitably people will have some John Hume stories, as John Hume was a big figure and there wasn’t a town in Northern Ireland that he didn’t go to.

“I am sure there are people in Limavady, who have John Hume stories, who met him, or who were helped by him as he was not only MP for Foyle but also an MEP.

“I am really looking forward to it and think it is going to be a really good night!”

Stephen grew up in Ballymena, where he was influenced by his politically aware parents and their friendly discussions on current affairs; he commented that there was always newspapers and radio news programmes in the house.

His interest in politics continued when he went to Nene College in England, writing for the student newspaper and becoming part of the Student’s Union Executive.

Following a postgraduate course in journalism at Portsmouth and joining the BBC in 1989 with Radio Leeds, he then returned to Northern Ireland working on radio and TV as a news reporter during the Troubles dominated period of the early 90s:

“It was a heavy news agenda, with Northern Ireland in the headlines in the UK and across the world.”

After joining BBC Spotlight as a documentary maker and working as a political correspondent for BBC Northern Ireland, he cites some of his favourite memories as reporting in USA on Ireland’s journey in the 1994 World Cup and making his first Spotlight documentary on Celtic FC.

Reporting on the Good Friday Agreement, the Peace Process and the Scottish Independence Referendum were also professional highlights in addition to travelling the globe to report for the BBC.

A change of career has led him to author four books, the latest of which, ‘John Hume: The Persuader’ has entered the Top Ten Bestselling Non-fiction books, being described as the definitive biography of John Hume.

He explains his passion for the subject:

“John Hume was central to the Peace Process, Senator George Mitchell said that without John Hume, there would have been no Peace Process.

“Irrespectively of your politics, we owe a debt of gratitude to John Hume, that he was able to move Northern Ireland from a position of shootings and bombings every day on the news to a point where we have a peace, albeit an imperfect peace.

“John Hume helped create the conditions for a better Northern Ireland.”

“I approached politicians that I knew and conducted interviews with them, so I spoke to people like Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach, I spoke to Gerry Adams, Lord Empey and Lord Alderdice.

“I contacted school friends of John Hume, I spoke to all five of his grown-up children, which gave me the family insight – who was the man away from the headlines?

“It was a labour of love, a lot of work but it was something that I wanted to do and I hope I have been able to bring something new to the table.”

Stephen adds that the book is an analysis of the acts which John Hume undertook in the name of peace, the speeches that he made, his tactics and motivation and the thoughts of his colleagues and political rivals.

“What is interesting about the book and this was very important to me, was that there is also criticism in there.

“This is not a book which says that John Hume is absolutely brilliant on every page - there are people in the book who are John Hume critics.

“It is, I hope, an honest, truthful testament of who John Hume was and what his contribution was to Irish history.”

Tickets for ‘John Hume the Persuader – Mark Carruthers in Conversation with Stephen Walker’ on Friday, February 2 at Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre are £10 and can be purchased from roevalleyarts.com.