Dean Godson - Himself Alone - David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

At the time, Trimble was prepared to give such Vanguardist ideas a fair wind. In an article in the Sunday News on 20 January 1974, he rebutted the views of Desmond Boal, QC, a leading adviser of Paisley. Boal believed that the time for greater integration of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom had passed – but that Ulster independence had never been a runner. Instead, he favoured a federal Ireland Parliament and Provincial Parliament with ‘Stormont’ powers. 23 Trimble took particular issue with Boal’s rejection of independence for Northern Ireland. He argued that if one accepted the notion that the British were prepared to pay large sums of money to leave Northern Ireland, then they would surely be just as happy to subsidise an independent Ulster as a united Ireland. He was implying that the coercion of Ulster into a united Ireland was costlier than independence. By contrast, independence might satisfy enough unionists and nationalists to leave behind a relatively stable entity. Intriguingly, he posited the idea that republicans mainly disliked ‘British’ forces, but had an ambiguous attitude towards Protestants (whom he did not describe as ‘British’). Once these ‘British’ forces were gone, and Protestants gave a guarantee that the purpose of such an entity was not to reinforce an anti-Catholic hegemony, all but the most irreconcilable elements of the republican movement might be able to enter into some compact in a new, independent Ulster.

Such ideas must have seemed fairly fanciful as sectarian tensions sharpened. Vanguard held a series of Province-wide rallies, culminating in a great demonstration at Belfast’s Ormeau Park in March 1972: the News Letter estimated the crowd to be 92,000, the RUC put it at 60,000. 24 Theatricality was an integral part of the Craig roadshow, who would arrive at gatherings with motorcycle outriders. It was widely reported that they were members of a uniformed group called the Vanguard Service Corps – although Trimble, for one, now doubts whether it actually ever existed in any organised sense. Trimble rebuts all allegations by the now deceased loyalist Sam McClure – that he was sworn into VSC at an initiation ceremony at Vanguard headquarters in Hawthornden Road – as ‘utter balls’. 25 Some nationalists found Vanguard gatherings fascistic and even Trimble now says he was ‘never terribly comfortable’ at these ‘embarrassing’ occasions. Nonetheless, he attended many such events. He was present at Castle Park, Bangor, in February 1972, where Craig inspected 6,500 men as they stood to attention wearing Vanguard armbands (although Trimble declined to wear one). 26 He also turned up for the mass gathering at Stormont, just days after the abolition of the Northern Ireland Parliament had been announced. 27

Given the circumstances – both civil war and British withdrawal seemed to be on the cards – Trimble did not consider Craig’s rhetoric to be unjustified. ‘Craig had a tendency to outbursts and to overstate things even before the Troubles,’ recalls Trimble. ‘But he was saying, “Look, there are a lot of people who don’t like the direction of government policy and if pushed they are prepared to fight.” His intention was to make Government in London sit up and think. He certainly succeeded in getting negative publicity!’ Some felt that Craig was unleashing terrible forces in society, but Trimble does not agree: ‘There were lots of things unleashing those forces – the abolition of Stormont, the IRA campaign. If anything, Craig’s rhetoric provided an emotional safety valve.’ 28 It was more than just rhetoric, though: Vanguard, after all, ‘saw itself as a resistance movement against an undemocratic regime that could be shown to be unworkable when the time came’. To that end, it aimed for ‘the coordination of all loyalist organisations under one banner to save Ulster’. The largest of these was the Ulster Defence Association, then still a legal organisation probably numbering about 40,000 members. 29 ‘Everybody was in it then,’ says Trimble. ‘I was conscious there were criminal types, but they were not dominant. The organisation then was a broad popular response to a near-civil war situation. But what’s happened to the loyalist paramilitaries is that the criminal types have taken over and the broad popular types have gone away’ (indeed, to this day, he thinks that the conventional police wisdom is wrong and that the Ulster Freedom Fighters are not a mere flag of convenience for the UDA, but are a separate organisation). In retrospect, however, he concedes that Craig’s condemnation of Protestant paramilitarism was inadequate. 30

Trimble never saw himself as a street activist in this cause; his contribution, he thought, would be as a cerebral backroom boy. In 1972, after his flat in Belfast became too dangerous, he moved back to Bangor and resumed contact with some local Orangemen. It was they who provided him with his first public platform at the Ballygrainey Orange Hall at Six Road Ends, between Bangor and Newtownards. In 1973, the British Government had produced a White Paper, which outlined some possible political structures for the Province. The new Assembly would be elected by proportional representation rather than the traditional first-past-the-post (in fact, there had been PR elections during the early years of Stormont, but these had soon been scrapped, largely to maintain the unity of the UUP). 31 No one knew how to operate the Single Transferable Vote system – except, everyone thought, David Trimble. Trimble, in fact, had to go into the Queen’s University library where he found a book on electoral systems by Enid Lakeman. 32 His description of how many candidates to run and how to maximise transfers so impressed one of those present, Albert Smith, that he called on Trimble shortly afterwards. Trimble recalls him asking: ‘“Would you like to give another talk?” I said yes, but when? “Tonight!” came the reply. It turned out he wanted me to speak to a North Down Vanguard meeting at Hamilton House, Bangor. I never looked back.’ 33

There, he met up with a group opposed to the local Faulknerite Unionist establishment. They included George Green, the former County Commandant of the since disbanded ‘B’ Specials, who was by now an independent councillor in the area. More important still to his long-term political development, he also met a Vanguard councillor, Mary O’Fee. Her husband, Stewart, was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, who would telephone Craig and identify himself as ‘the Seaside Voice’. Trimble worried that the ‘tide of history’ was turning against the Unionists, but Stewart O’Fee snorted dismissively and told him to read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism , which he found inspirational. 34 But O’Fee came to have an even more direct influence: he was the anonymous author of two Vanguard’s best pamphlets, Ulster – A Nation (April 1972) and Community of the British Isles (1973). 35 The former, in Trimble’s own words, ‘hurled defiance at our enemies’. It was a trenchant rebuttal of the High Tory case for Ulster’s integration into the United Kingdom along the lines of Scotland and Wales, whose best-known advocate was Enoch Powell. But O’Fee believed this approach contained profound dangers for Ulster. First, the Province would be integrated into the more urbanised, ‘permissive society’ of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ – an unattractive end in itself for a still-religious people. Second, even if it was desirable in principle, integrationists did not possess the means to achieve this: peaceful persuasion would not work since the main British parties did not want it and street protests to attain it would only alienate their fellow citizens with whom they wanted to integrate. Third, Trimble shared O’Fee’s belief that pure integration, without any body which Ulster could call its own to undergird it, contained a political trap. They both believed that integration could only work if the three main parties at Westminster supported the Union. But since many in Labour and the Liberals then appeared to favour the principle of Irish unity, albeit peacefully achieved, as an ultimate outcome, integration would leave Ulster and its tiny twelve-man contingent at the mercy of the 630-strong Commons.