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

As time went on, it became clear that the Government would not budge. It correctly calculated – on the advice of Sir Robert Armstrong and other senior officials – that there would be no repeat of 1974. 34 They also came to this conclusion on the basis of assessments from the security forces. 35 For in 1974, there was a locally-based political experiment to bring down. This time, there was an unassailable international treaty signed by two governments which could not be pressurised like the Faulk – nerites were. The ‘Irish dimension’ had thus been used to outflank the Unionist majority in Ulster. Or, as John Hume was reported as saying, ‘I always expected a furious Unionist reaction to the Agreement, but the Protestant boil had to be lanced.’ 36 The Government also saw that hardline loyalist protests, such as the 1977 strike and Paisley’s much-vaunted ‘Carson Trail’ of 1981 had been damp squibs: in the more straitened financial circumstances of the 1980s, loyalists were less prepared to engage in the kind of industrial militancy which had proven so successful across the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Partly, this was conditioned by the growing dependence of both the Protestant and the Catholic working classes on the subvention of the United Kingdom Exchequer. Above all, the British Government correctly reasoned that the ultra-respectable Molyneaux and the UUP would never sanction a mass uprising: indeed, Molyneaux and his party only accepted the March 1986 Day of Action when they were left with no other choice. 37

Unionist protests became ever more desperate, partly out of frustration with the Unionist leadership. In his first major interview in the News Letter , on 6 November 1986, Trimble said: ‘If you have a situation where there is a serious attack on your constitutional position and liberties – and I regard the AIA as being just that – and where the Government tells you constitutional action is ineffective, you are left in a very awkward situation. Do you sit back and do nothing, or move outside constitutional forms of protest? I don’t think you can deal with the situation without the risk of an extra-parliamentary campaign. I would personally draw the line at terrorism and serious violence. But if we are talking about a campaign that involves demonstrations and so on, then a certain amount of violence may be inescapable.’ In fact, Trimble’s course in this period was seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, he wanted an escalation of protests, warning that unless the Unionist leadership improved its performance, the paramilitaries would soon take over. On the other hand, during the June 1987 General Election, he was struck by the reaction on the doorstep in Lisburn. There was hostility to the council boycott – as reflected in the Lagan Valley Unionist Association minute books – but more especially to the MPs’ policy of staying out of the Commons chamber. Boycotts were to Trimble a tactic, not a principle, and if they were undermining the struggle then they would have to be wound down. But if Trimble’s methods for attaining his goals were variable, so were his goals. On the one hand, he lent his support to those Unionists who responded to the AIA by urging complete integration into the United Kingdom; on the other, he flirted with constitutional forms which resembled independence. He was the most senior Unionist to campaign in a personal capacity in the 1986 Fulham by-election for his Queen’s colleague Boyd Black, then a B&ICO activist, who ran as Democratic Rights for Northern Ireland candidate. And although many integrationist themes found their way into Ulster Clubs’ literature (indeed, Boyd Black’s election address was printed on the front page of Ulster Defiant) , Trimble’s own pamphlet for Ulster Clubs explored a much wider range of options, ranging from Powellite-style total integration to independence. The treatise was entitled What Choice for Ulster ? and it came down on the side of Dominion status – in other words, a relationship that bore more similarity to full independence than integration. It was an unusually glossy publication by the Samizdat-like standards of Loyalist pamphlets: the front cover bore the famous propaganda poster entitled Ulster 1914 , with the Province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair. She defiantly carries her rifle against a Union Jack background, proclaiming the words ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone’.

Trimble declared that Ulstermen were aiming for negotiated separation rather than UDI. Not only, Trimble declared, would this new Ulster be able to rely on ‘native ingenuity’ but it would also enjoy food provided by provincial farmers and energy supplies from Antrim lignite and Fermanagh gas. In echoes of his first speech to the Assembly and to the Nobel Prize-winning ceremony in Oslo, Trimble acknowledged that more could have been done during the 50 years of Unionist domination to make nationalists feel at home. ‘We should say to the nationalists in our midst, “a united Ireland is impossible, but a united Ulster is possible, and we invite you to be part of it”,’ observed Trimble. Workers’ Weekly regarded such thoughts as ‘twaddle’ produced by an ‘introverted Unionist’. and in its edition of 22 August 1987 opined: ‘What is being said here in code is more or less the equivalent of what the Provisionals are saying – get out of the house but leave the money on the table.’ These musings would not be forgotten by Trimble’s rivals: years later, in a televised debate on the eve of the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement, Paisley dusted off the pamphlet to illustrate his belief that the UUP leader was soft on the Union. 38 Trimble, though, never took such reasoning to its logical conclusion to advocate full-scale independence – such as the ‘Republic of Northern Ireland’. He held several meetings with a Presbyterian cleric from Co. Tyrone, Rev. Hugh Ross, who headed the Ulster independence movement, but remained unpersuaded. Trimble believes that the bulk of Ulster Unionists would never wish completely to relinquish the link with the Crown. 39

How does Trimble reconcile these varying positions? After all, one of them (integrationism) is based upon the notion of the inherent inclusiveness of Unionism; the other is based upon the ‘apartness’ of the Ulster-British from both the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic. Trimble argues that equal citizenship is very much the first choice of all Unionists, as was the case in 1921; but that if that is not on offer, then they will have to find some alternatives which preserve their way of life. He had concluded that the Union was in such peril that he had to set as many hares running as possible – including contradictory approaches in which he did not necessarily believe himself. If integrationism took off, all well and good. If not, then alternatives would have to be found. Another reason why Trimble could embrace both apparently contradictory approaches is that there is an element of intellectual gamesmanship in Trimble’s personality, which owes much to his training as an academic lawyer: he will draft anything for the sake of an argument. What is certainly the case is that Trimble was one of very few people who straddled the two, mutually antagonistic strains within Unionism: one was the world of integrationism, of the vision of Northern Ireland as part of a broader, more cosmopolitan entity. This attracted many Unionist colleagues in the professional middle classes and amongst Queen’s undergraduates after the AIA. The other world was that of ‘little Ulster’ which, more often than not, had its roots in evangelical Protestantism and was much remoter from the British mainstream. He was not, though, the only Ulster politician to adopt a dizzying array of positions: as Clifford Smyth notes in his study of Paisley, ‘the Doc’ was also perfectly capable of adopting integrationism, devolution, or independence – depending upon which of them most advanced the Protestant interest at a given moment. 40