Pat Hume, wife of “Ireland’s greatest person” John Hume, has said she believes very strongly in the power of prayer and always encourages her grandchildren in their prayer lives.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Sunday with Miriam, Mrs Hume told Miriam O’Callaghan that she believes “very strongly” in the power of prayer. Her normal practice over the years has entailed stopping into a church to pray briefly while on the way home from work, she said.
While her older grandchildren are “not quite so Gospel-greedy”, she said she regularly advises them “If you’re passing a church, and you have five minutes, just nip in, say ‘I’m here’, and, if things are going really well, say ‘thank you’, and if things are not going so well, say ‘Where are you? Help me’”.
Mrs Hume spoke about how her one-time seminarian husband, a founder of the SDLP who became chief architect of the Peace Process and was voted Ireland’s Greatest Person in a 2010 poll, has suffered from dementia-related memory problems since suffering some brain damage during an operation in the late 1990s.
“Over the years this has got worse and his memory is now very bad,” she said, although she noted that her home city Derry is “a dementia-friendly city” and that her husband still enjoys the newspaper and does crosswords.