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

Reg Empey, then a Convention member, says that Craig never consulted him about the idea – even though he was chairman of Vanguard and his running mate in East Belfast. There had been no meeting of the party’s full council, nor any debate at constituency level, and once leaks started to appear in the press, local party workers started to make alarmed calls to headquarters. The Vanguard leader insisted ‘that they had to strike while the iron is hot’ remembers Empey. ‘I observed that we had been the principal complainants under O’Neill that there had been no consultation and numerous attempts to bounce the party into decisions without debate. But Bill had made up his mind, he was absolutely rigid and inflexible. Back me or sack me was his approach. He didn’t take a conciliatory approach to colleagues.’ 30 Certainly, the lack of preparation of the grassroots contributed to the emerging debacle, but it was not the only cause of it. As so often in Northern Ireland, terrorist action played its part in hardening attitudes: on 1 September 1975, four Protestants were murdered by the South Armagh Republican Action Force (a cover name for the Provisional IRA) at the Tullyvallen Orange Hall in Newtownhamilton, Co. Armagh. 31

A more important cause of the the Voluntary Coalition disaster lay in the internal dynamics of Unionist politics – or, more precisely in this instance, Protestant politics. For when word of it leaked out to Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, the reaction of his co-religionists was unanimous: have nothing to do with this. At a Church meeting on 7 September, Paisley was told that any further dalliance with the coalition idea would divide the Free Presbyterians as well as the DUP. 32 Trimble also discerned two reactions within the UUP. The first related to their doubts about holding their own supporters in line with Paisley touring the country denouncing the proponents of the scheme as ‘Vanguard Republicans’. But the second calculation was, Trimble believes to this day, more cynical: that many of them saw Craig’s gamble as a way of destroying the Vanguard leader. After all, by the 1975 Convention elections, Vanguard had leapt into second place in terms of the overall number of seats within the UUUC coalition (14 compared to the DUP’s 12 and the UUP’s 19, even though it was still third in terms of the popular vote). Moreover, it had more capable people than the DUP and UUP. In fact, as Clifford Smyth – a not uncritical observer – notes in his biography of Paisley, such low calculation was probably not the motive of the DUP leader in this instance: whilst ‘the Doc’ did eventually reap political rewards from the destruction of Vanguard, there was no way of knowing this for sure on 8 September 1975. After all, no one can have anticipated that having gone up the Voluntary Coalition cul-de-sac, and been stymied, Craig would not have been nimble-footed enough to extricate himself. 33 But above all, the bulk of elected Unionists were in no mind to compromise on very much after 1974: the Convention was, in Maurice Hayes’s words, ‘Unionism’s victory lap’. 34 So when the idea of a Voluntary Coalition was put forward at a full meeting of the UUUC Convention group, the proposal was duly rejected. Paisley then put forward a motion rejecting the presence of ‘republicans’ in the Government of Northern Ireland, which was passed by 37–1; although he was one of Craig’s staunchest supporters, Trimble actually abstained, reasoning that there would be no point in being the sole dissenter in the room (Craig, he says, had left by this point). 35

Craig’s offer also prompted astonishment in England – and praise from unlikely quarters. 36 An Observer profile of 14 September 1975 likened him to O’Neill, Chichester-Clark and Faulkner, ‘each a Unionist leader who tried to confront the prejudices of his supporters, and was swept aside. In each case, the British public has been mystified by the apparent transformation, at bewildering speed, from near villain to near hero. So before it happens to Craig, the British public should be warned about a significant literary genre, the Belfast Europa school of journalism. Deeply influenced by the Western “B” movie, this school’s simple rule has been to identify, preferably on the journey into Belfast from Aldergrove airport, the Good Guys in the White Hat. Craig has last week been awarded his white hat.’ Trimble duly noted the praise heaped on Craig by the mainland establishment, but not because it betokened to him a sell-out: rather, it illustrated to him how anxious official and semi-official circles were to latch on to any good idea. Far from having a master plan, the British state, in his eyes, was often rudderless in its aims and incompetent in its execution. 37

Craig then proceeded to launch a media blitz to overturn the UUUC decision, spearheaded by Burnside and Trimble, and he won the support of the Vanguard Central Council on 11 October by 128 votes to 79 after a fighting speech. But the bulk of the Convention party were not with him and shortly thereafter they formed the United Ulster Unionist Movement. Then, following a five-hour meeting at Stormont Craig, Trimble, Barr and Green were expelled from the UUUC grouping. The Ernie Baird faction was admitted in their place, and Baird himself became deputy leader of the UUUC. 38 But Trimble’s own expulsion was delayed. The reason had nothing to do with any innate affection for the man amongst his brother loyalists. Rather, it had everything to do with the fact that as chairman of the UUUC drafting committee he was the main author of the report which had to be delivered imminently by each of the parties. Despite some suggestions that he leave his detractors in the lurch, Trimble completed the task, asserting that it was vital for Unionism that it be done properly. 39 After the split, he also became deputy leader of the rump Vanguard party.

Trimble derived some crucial lessons from this episode. The first was that Craig should have done more to consult the average member of the Convention about the evolution of his thinking and the contacts with the SDLP. The sense of shock when these dealings emerged, says Trimble, did much to weaken Craig’s position when the deal went awry and they panicked. 40 Trimble, who was part of Craig’s inner circle, initially went to the opposite extreme in dealing with his Assembly party after the Belfast Agreement of 1998. According to Trimble, the collapse of Craig’s initiative was one of the great political disasters to have befallen the Province during the Troubles. Had that opportunity been taken, he says, there would have been political stability in the second half of the 1970s, and an end to terrorism soon thereafter. There would have been no Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 – giving the Republic a say in the governance of Ulster for the first time – and none of the present political developments. And it amused him greatly when the DUP launched their Devolution Now document on 6 February 2004 – in which the Paisleyites extolled the concept of a voluntary coalition with the SDLP as one of three options for the future of the Province. 41

Yet in the short term, Trimble was to suffer even more acute, personal discomfiture as a result of the Voluntary Coalition debacle. In the last debate of the Convention, on 3 March 1976 – just before its dissolution – Trimble wound up for Vanguard. His concluding remarks were directed at his UUUC colleagues, and especially at Paisley: ‘In 1972, he [Paisley] was not prepared to exert himself to defend Stormont and in 1976 he does not seem to be prepared to exert himself to restore it …’ opined Trimble. ‘In the debate of the last few days I have been reminded of an old Russian proverb that I came across in the pages of The Gulag Archipelago , volume 2, to the effect that we should look for our brave men in prisons and for the fools amongst the politicians.’ 42 It was, says Trimble, a bit of hyperbole on his part to hurt Paisley: in his view the DUP leader had always been a short-term thinker who was prepared to undermine Stormont for the sake of gaining an immediate advantage over the UUP. But the quote from Solzhenitsyn was also, he contended, a reference to his view of the way in which Paisley’s rhetoric had fired up a lot of loyalist people, who had then ended up in Northern Ireland’s jails. Those who did those deeds, thinks Trimble today (and then), had more bravery than those who encouraged them. 43