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

IN THE autumn of 1973, Trimble became the chairman of the constituency council of North Down Vanguard and was elected Publications Officer at the entire party’s annual general meeting. 1 Many in Vanguard – including Trimble – were celebrating the success of the brand-new party in the Assembly elections, but Craig counselled caution. Hardline Unionists had, in fact, suffered a political defeat. Much as Unionists disliked his compromises, Faulkner was still in business. Now that the Assembly was up and running, the stage would be set for the establishment of the second pillar of the new political order as envisaged by the 1973 White Paper for Northern Ireland – a power-sharing executive (the third being the ‘Irish dimension’). The creation of this executive was announced on 22 November 1973, although the wrangling over its composition and size was reminiscent of the disagreements which bedevilled the same exercise some 25 years later. Eventually, it was agreed that Unionists would hold six of the eleven seats, with four for the largely nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party and one for the Alliance. Faulkner became Chief Executive and Gerry Fitt, the leader of the SDLP, became Deputy Chief Executive. Although there was a bi-partisan welcome for this development in Great Britain, loyalists were enraged and vowed to destroy it.

The third and final pillar of the new institutions of government was to be the Council of Ireland. This was a reincarnation of the Council of Ireland provided for in the 1920 Act: it was originally intended that powers gradually be transferred to this body as a prelude to re-unification, albeit under the Crown. It fell into abeyance not because of Unionist intransigence, but because Dublin never nominated any representatives to it (a refusal which suited the Unionists well enough). There was, however, one key difference between the 1920 and 1973–4 settlements: the 1920 Government of Ireland Act notionally envisaged growing harmonisation, through the agency of the Council, between two devolved areas of the United Kingdom. As things turned out, only Northern Ireland accepted the 1920 settlement, whilst the southern part of the island gradually went its own way. 2 As Unionists saw it, such a formulation was more disadvantageous in the very different circumstances of the 1970s. For the 1973 Council of Ireland would have combined representatives of a devolved region of the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland) with the representatives of a fully fledged sovereign entity that had severed residual links (namely the Republic of Ireland). Only once this Council had been established would full-scale direct rule be scrapped. However, the security powers would remain a matter for Westminster for the time being.

The British Government hoped that the emerging package would be sufficiently attractive to mollify most Unionists. Under its provisions, the Unionists secured the return of a devolved local parliament, albeit with smaller majorities under the new PR system than they had enjoyed under the first-past-the-post; and they would return to office, but not on the basis of traditional majority rule. Instead, it would be in an enforced cross-community coalition with some of their harsh critics in the SDLP. For nationalists, it was the all-Ireland aspects of the deal which were most important: the gradual transfer of powers to the Council of Ireland was seen by them as possessing the potential, over time, to take Ulster peacefully out of the United Kingdom and into a united Ireland of some kind. After all, they argued, they would be acquiescing in the return of Unionists to the hated Stormont, where nationalists would still be in the minority; and they acknowledged more explicitly than before that Ireland could be re-unified only with the consent of Ulster’s majority. Therefore, in order to keep their constituency happy, the SDLP and the Irish Government felt that they had to obtain a ‘result’ on the Council of Ireland. 3 Heath duly summoned the leaders of the power-sharing parties – Faulkner Unionists, Alliance and the SDLP as well as the Irish government – for a conference at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in Berkshire to draw these strands together. The deal struck there contained many of the elements found in the Belfast Agreement of 1998: hence the famous bon mot of Seamus Mallon, now Deputy First Minister, that any subsequent settlement would be ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. 4 By this, Mallon meant that the broad outlines for any new arrangements in Northern Ireland were always going to be the same, whether in 1973–4 or in 1998–9. According to this analysis, the hardliners on both sides were too obstinate or confident of securing an unattainable ethnic victory over the other to perceive this essential reality.

But others have invested the phrase with a meaning beyond that given to it by Mallon. Mallon may have implied that David Trimble – a trenchant critic of Sunningdale – was one of the ‘slow learners’. But to pro-Agreement Unionists, it was the two Governments who were themselves slow learners. From a moderate Unionist standpoint, the Governments had asked Faulkner, the leader of the largest party representing the majority community, to bear too much of a political burden: indeed, the then Irish Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald, with John Hume, pushed for a more ambitious version of the Council of Ireland. 5 Faulkner called these cross-border arrangements – which, initially at least, comprised tourism and animal health – as ‘necessary nonsense’ that would keep nationalists happy within essentially partitionist structures. But most Unionists perceived them to be an embryonic government for the whole island. Unionists (and, above all, David Trimble) derived the lesson that it was these all-Ireland aspects of the deal – rather than power-sharing with nationalists – which were unacceptable to the mass of Unionists. That is why in the week of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 – when the very ‘Green’ draft settlement was rejected by Unionists – Lord Alderdice of the Alliance party brought a predecessor who served in the Sunningdale Executive, Sir Oliver Napier, to meet Tony Blair. His purpose was to explain to the Prime Minister that Trimble would end up as another Faulkner if the draft agreement was rammed down his throat. 6 The ghost of Faulkner thus hangs over much of what Trimble does: indeed, both men rose to the leadership on account of their strong Orange credentials, in Trimble’s case because of Drumcree, in Faulkner’s because he led a disputed Orange march down the Longstone Road in Annalong, Co. Down, in 1955. 7

Curiously, Trimble recalls that he felt a degree of sympathy with Faulkner’s dilemma even at the time. David Bleakley, who was the Northern Ireland Labour party’s representative in the 1975–6 Convention, remembers being struck by the fact that Trimble was one of the very few rejectionists in that body who did not lash into the deposed Faulkner. 8 Nonetheless, like everyone in Vanguard, Trimble found the overall Sunningdale package unacceptable. The prospects of derailing it, however, seemed at first slender. Shouting abuse at the Faulknerites in the Assembly had not proved noticeably successful. When Trimble heard of the idea of an all-out strike to protest against the new dispensation, he doubted whether it would work, for he recalled the ignominious failure of the earlier protests. In a peculiar way, this was to be a key card in the hands of the loyalist resistance. There had been so many abortive acts of defiance that when the strikes became really serious in May 1974, it came as a surprise to much of the government machine. As ever Vanguard, with its extraordinary mix of town and gown, took the lead in coordinating the resistance of a variety of loyalist organisations to the emerging settlement. Craig brought Trimble to the Portrush conference in December 1973, which was the precursor to the formation of the United Ulster Unionist Council. The UUUC (or ‘Treble UC’ as it came to be known) was to become the umbrella group for all of those Unionists – Vanguard, DUP and anti-Faulkner Ulster Unionists – opposed to the ‘historic compromise’ with nationalism. The aim of the conference was to evolve a single policy statement, for which purpose Trimble was a very suitable choice. He became a leading light in the working party that adopted a federalist blueprint for the constitution of the United Kingdom. Trimble first met both Enoch Powell and James Molyneaux there. 9 ‘His was a very clinical kind of approach,’ recalls Molyneaux. ‘He was not at that stage concerned about whose toes he trampled on. And there was the natural tendency of anyone in that age group to have a very strong idea and to take it to the limit – and to shoot down any old fogey.’ 10 If Trimble was intellectually arrogant, it certainly did him little harm: he spoke in nearly every debate and he remembers Ernie Baird telling him that he was the success of the conference. Later, Craig also asked him to draft the rule book for a new organisation of which little was then known: the Ulster Workers’ Council. At first, it was one of of innumerable organisations of the period, which seemed to arise and then disappear with dizzying regularity – but it would soon acquire great significance. Not that anyone, recalls Trimble, would have needed to consult such a constitution: the exercise was purely to give the organisation a veneer of procedural respectability in the event that anyone had asked. Moreover, it brought Trimble into contact with Harry Murray, a Belfast shipyard shop steward who chaired the UWC and lived in Bangor (and who often gave Trimble lifts into the city). 11