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

Meanwhile, the Orangemen would have to fall back to facilitate disengagement of the two sides. Jim Blair then walked the length of the RUC line. As he went along, he tapped each Hotspur with his 30-inch blackthorn swagger stick (a prerogative of senior policemen since the days of the old Royal Irish Constabulary, but banned after the RUC’s replacement by the new Police Service of Northern Ireland) thus signalling that the vehicle should move back. 32 At 10:30, Gracey led the 800 or so Orangemen down the hill, past the silent residents of the Garvaghy Road, who had removed themselves from the thoroughfare at a given signal. According to Gordon Lucy, those who participated remembered above all else the sound of tramping feet. By the time they arrived at Shillington’s Bridge, an atmosphere prevailed that was reminiscent of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike: Jim Blair in all his years as a policeman never saw a scene like it, with ex-servicemen weeping tears of joy. 33 Trimble, who rejoined them now, was exhausted rather than emotional. As the march swept up to Carleton Street, the Orangemen came to a halt. A shout went up for Gracey and then for Trimble and Paisley. Paisley, though, seemed to be forging ahead. Trimble knew that he had to do something to maintain his status as Paisley’s equal. ‘My thought was, “I don’t want this fellow walking in front of me, upstaging me.”’ Thus it was that the two men clasped hands at chest level, as they took the salute of the admiring throng. ‘By this gesture I made sure that we would both be walking side by side,’ Trimble says. 34 ‘No words were spoken,’ recalls Paisley. ‘It was a spontaneous gesture.’ 35 But he had no realisation of how this episode would be seen, nor even that cameras would be present. Thus was born the idea that Trimble had danced a jig with Paisley down the Garvaghy Road in full view of the Catholic residents – though, in fact the episode took place approximately a mile away on Carleton Street, in front of loyalists. If Trimble’s account is right, the walk with Paisley down Carleton Street was born of opportunism and relief, rather than innate triumphalism. But the oddest part of this episode is that no one viewing the video of the event could ever suppose that any kind of dance was going on. The idea that the two men performed a jig may originate with the editorial in the Irish News of 12 July 1995 (the day after) which accused Trimble of ‘dancing’ over the feelings of his nationalist constituents, but this was obviously meant in a metaphorical sense only. Certainly, neither the Irish News nor the Belfast Telegraph of 11 or 12 July mentions either Trimble or Paisley ‘holding hands’ or ‘dancing’; and, as was shown years later in his comments on the iniquities of ‘line dancing’, Ian Paisley took a dim view of jigging with women, let alone male political rivals. One theory advanced by the writer C.D.C. Armstrong is that the comedian Patrick Kielty in his BBC Northern Ireland comedy show in the autumn of 1995, showed the film of Trimble and Paisley holding hands and put it into reverse at high speed, thus making it appear as if they were dancing. Whatever the strange origins of this myth, it became ever more embedded in the consciousness of nationalist Ireland. Shortly thereafter, Trimble would compound the anguish of local nationalists by denying that there had been any compromise struck with their representatives, and this would make it harder to resolve the crisis in the following year. Trimble acknowledges that the image of him ‘dancing a jig’ down the Garvaghy Road was ‘unhelpful’ and that it was exploited in ways that were detrimental to the Orange interest. He was determined to ensure that it did not happen again and he pointedly refused to be ‘chaired’ by the crowd during Drumcree 1996. 36 The bitterness which attended the close of proceedings obscured the real achievement of the RUC and the Mediation Network – to have secured some sort of agreement between the Orangemen and the nationalist residents. It was certainly the last occasion on which there was any kind of consensus and henceforth the march would either effectively go down by force majeure or not at all. 37

In the eyes of the British Government, the first ‘siege of Drumcree’ confirmed their suspicion that none of the Unionists could be trusted; one civil servant who observed Patrick Mayhew at close quarters remembers that it confirmed him in his conviction that the Northern Protestants were sui generis. Even now, Mayhew says that Trimble’s performance was ‘undoubtedly triumphalist, and there’s no point in saying it wasn’t’. 38 He remembers that the Irish Government – not understanding how the relationship between police and politicians differs between Northern Ireland and the Republic – assumed that the Ulster Secretary could just snap his fingers and obtain the result he wanted. Fergus Finlay, the special adviser to Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, recalls coming back from holiday to find a new hate figure in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin – David Trimble. 39 The television critic of the Irish Times was scathing: ‘Ruddy, gloating and pompous, David Trimble’s face filled the screen.’ 40 Nuala O’Faolain, writing in the Irish Times , thought that the irresponsibility of men such as Trimble and Paisley would turn places such as the Garvaghy Road into ‘little Mostars’ (a reference to the scenes of devastation in the Bosnian War). ‘They don’t have to live, of course, where their neighbours hate them and they hate and fear their neighbours. They just do what harm is to hand, and go home to their comfortable houses,’ she observed. 41 To many of his critics, Trimble’s behaviour was reminiscent of nothing so much as John Hewitt’s description, in his poem ‘Minister’, of the young Brian Faulkner – who initially made a name for himself as a hardliner for his role in ensuring that an Orange parade went down the Longstone Road in Annalong, Co. Down:

Not one of your tall captains bred to rule

that right confirmed by school and army list

he went to school, but not the proper school.

His family tree will offer little grist

to any plodding genealogist;

his father’s money grew from making shirts.

But with ambition clenched in his tight fist,

and careful to discount the glancing hurts,

he climbed to office, studiously intent,

and reached the door he planned to enter, twice

to have it slammed by the establishment.

A plight that well might sympathy command,

had we not watched that staff of prejudice

he’d used with skill turn serpent in his hand

Frank Ormsby (ed.), The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Belfast, 1992), p. 141

Why did Trimble arouse such hostility in nationalist Ireland and amongst mainland progressive opinion? Trimble shrugs his shoulders and says that such anger is of ‘no interest to him’, but it is worth examining the reasons for it. To his detractors, both nationalist and now loyalist, there has always been ‘something of the night about him’ (to quote Ann Widdecombe’s description of Michael Howard in his time as Home Secretary). 42 Like Howard, Trimble may also have aroused liberal revulsion, precisely because many right-thinking people feel that someone of his intelligence and professional standing ought to have known better. Trimble was, therefore, potentially much more dangerous than someone such as Ian Paisley precisely because he was both hardline and a thoroughly modern man, who could not be dismissed as a throwback to the 17th-century Covenanters. He had secured the support of much of the London quality print media without compromising his principles, or playing the liberal Unionist. Thus The Times took ‘the presence on the march of the moderate Unionist MP, David Trimble’ as evidence of ‘the broad appeal which the Orange Order still exercises in the Province’. 43 Then there was also the undercurrent that Trimble was engaged in sheer opportunism, of playing to the mob. Some, such as Jim Blair who observed Trimble closely in those days, believe that Trimble saw the entire issue as a magnificent opportunity to burnish his Orange credentials in preparation for a leadership bid. 44 Certainly, as he readily admits, there was opportunism in his behaviour at Carleton Street once it was all over, but that does not mean that it was governed by such considerations all along. 45 It was a huge risk, as is attested to by Trimble’s nervousness during the crisis (Gordon Lucy remembers that at moments, his arm went into a spasm) and he knew he would suffer the brunt of any recriminations if either they did not go down the road or else did so with large-scale casualties. Indeed, Gordon Lucy recalls that he shouted to Trimble on the Monday night, ‘this will be the making of you’, but that Trimble demurred. Trimble also said to Lucy afterwards that he feared that 1996 would be an unmitigated disaster and that the Orangemen would not ‘get away with it’ two years running. 46 Drumcree was, therefore, subject to too many variables for it to be a truly satisfactory launching pad for Trimble’s leadership bid, at least when the crisis began. Rather, Trimble appears genuinely to have been swept along by his sense of duty as the local MP. It was a predicament which even internal rivals such as John Taylor understood. ‘If I’d have been the MP for the seat, what on earth would I have done?’ asks the veteran politician. 47 But Trimble was also swept along by the emotion of the occasion, which was bound up with such hallowed loyalist concepts as the right to ‘walk the Queen’s highway’ – to which he heartily subscribed. During the crisis itself, he told several people that if the march went through, it would be as significant a development in the history and folklore of Orangeism as the events at Dolly’s Brae in 1849 (when, according to Protestant lore, the Catholic Ribbonmen sought to prevent Co. Down Orangemen from completing their march via their preferred route through the Mourne Mountains). As Trimble’s friend Ruth Dudley Edwards observes the historical romance of the events at Drumcree would have appealed to the theatrical streak in his personality – and it explains his request to Lucy to write his book, which was begun in August 1995. 48 In so far as he was thinking in a calculated way about political effects, Trimble felt that street protest was the only way to obtain results under direct rule – a system which he once described to me in deliberately hyperbolic terms as ‘dictatorship moderated by riot’. 49 ‘Old thinking’, perhaps, to use Gorbachevian terminology, but scarcely evidence of a preordained stratagem on Trimble’s part to advance his career. Indeed, for much of his career, he has drifted into situations and improvised rather than pursued a detailed, preordained game plan. 50