“A Tribute to John Hume” was painted by the Bogside Artists in 2008 in an effort to depict Hume, “not as a politician or even as a popular leader but as a man of peace”
(The People’s Gallery). John Hume was a key player in the formation of the Good Friday Agreement, a leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Civil Rights movement, and a member of the Northern Ireland, British, and European Parliaments.
Hume is placed in the company of Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Nelson Mandela, all winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. This clearly positions him as a peace maker—as the Bogside Artists wanted. Each of these figures also had some involvement in Northern Ireland. Mother Theresa was educated in Dublin (The People’s Gallery), Nelson Mandela met with Gerry Adams in 1995, one of many, “Community activists and ex-combatants [who] traveled in both directions, observing developments and sharing views” as South Africa and Ireland developed through sometimes parallel struggles (Rolston, 463), and Hume cited Martin Luther King Jr. as his biggest influence, following in the tradition of, “Irish civil rights activists in the late 1960s [who] consciously modeled elements of their campaign on what Black Americans were doing contemporaneously” (Rolston, 464).
The other major element of this mural is the bridge which was modeled off the Brooklyn Bridge because of the, “belief held by many during its construction that it would collapse because of its span” and because according to the Bogside Artists: “Peace in Northern Ireland is to politics what the Brooklyn Bridge is to engineering, an almost miraculous achievement!” (The People’s Gallery).