John Hume, a moderate Roman Catholic politician who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his dogged and ultimately successful campaign to end decades of bloodshed in his native Northern Ireland, died on Monday in the northern city of Derry. He was 83.
His death, at a nursing home, was announced by his family in a statement, which did not give the cause, though his wife, Pat Hume, had earlier acknowledged that he was struggling with dementia.
"It seems particularly apt for these strange and fearful days to remember the phrase that gave hope to John and so many of us through dark times: We shall overcome," his family said.
Hume, a former French teacher who was known for a sharp wit but rarely for rhetorical flourishes, rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become the longtime leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party and a towering figure in the grinding and oft-thwarted drive to end 25 years of "The Troubles," as Northern Ireland's strife was known.
In his campaign for peace, inspired by the example of Martin Luther King Jr., he employed a winning combination of public exhortation against the violence of the Irish Republican Army and secret diplomacy with its political leadership, sitting down for talks in his modest row house over coffee. Deftly and persistently he enlisted the White House to help him reach his goal.
His efforts were recognized when he shared the Nobel with Protestant leader David Trimble in 1998, the year of the Good Friday peace agreement, which crowned his commitment to ending the unrest that had claimed more than 3,000 lives.
A television poll in Ireland in 2010 proclaimed Hume "Ireland's Greatest," ahead of prominent contenders like rock star Bono. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI awarded him a papal knighthood.
Paradoxically, in bringing more radical Roman Catholic figures to the negotiating table - notably Gerry Adams, the head of the IRA's political wing - Hume undermined his own party's appeal to voters. Battling poor health, he resigned in 2001 as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which he had led since 1979, without enjoying the high office that might normally reward an architect of historic change.
In 2004, he said he would no longer seek election to the European and British parliaments, which he joined in 1979 and 1983, respectively. In late 2015, his wife, who was also his political manager, told the BBC that he was experiencing "severe difficulties" with dementia.
Throughout a career in Northern Ireland politics, in which finger-pointing and recrimination amplified a drumbeat of bombings and killings, Hume stood as a voice of reason, counseling against the cycles of bloodshed between the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority.
"An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," he said, attributing the comment to King.
He argued instead for dialogue and reconciliation to still the furious conflict that pitted the IRA against Protestant paramilitary groups and thousands of British army soldiers. "We have to start spilling our sweat, not our blood," he declared.
In the parlance of Northern Ireland, Hume was a "nationalist" whose dream of a reunited Ireland had no place for the violence embraced by "republicans" like the IRA, with its armed fighters and networks of financiers, bomb-makers and sympathizers in the region and in the United States. Rather, he foresaw a time when Northern Ireland's divide would give way to peace and economic self-interest.
Hume was so concerned about multimillion-dollar funding for the IRA by Irish Americans that he traveled frequently to Washington to convince U.S. leaders, from President Jimmy Carter onward, that a majority of Northern Irish people rejected the IRA's violent methods.