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

Trimble recalls that the speech caused excitement in No. 10: Downing Street was looking for flexibility and his speech afforded them the necessary space to ‘get off the prior decommissioning hook’. But the reaction elsewhere was less favourable. William Ross, who was listening with his wife Christine, was shocked. ‘Did he say what I think he said?’ she inquired. ‘And where does this leave us?’ ‘In one bloody awful hole,’ replied the East Londonderry MP with customary candour. 4 From the other side of the divide, the SDLP – which would be critical to the success of any such venture – was scathing. Thus, Mark Durkan mocked the illogicality of Trimble’s willingness to engage with Sinn Fein in an assembly but refusal to hold all-party talks without decommissioning. 5 Many felt that the reason for SDLP hostility to the Trimble plan was that the party feared it would do badly in any contest with Sinn Fein, which had been legitimated by the ‘peace process’ and which was a much younger and more dynamic party. Significantly, though, the plan was not dismissed out of hand by the Taoiseach, John Bruton. 6 The emerging relationship between Trimble and the Irish state would be critical to the UUP leader’s willingness to engage in the talks and ultimately to sign the Belfast Agreement. It was to be a tortuous and sometimes tempestuous process – on both sides – and its beginnings were inauspicious. Fergus Finlay, Dick Spring’s adviser, recalls that when Trimble was elected leader, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin (known as ‘DFA’) feared that the relationships forged with liberal Unionists in the early 1990s – with figures such as Ken Maginnis and the McGimpsey brothers – counted for nothing. It was assumed that those whom the Irish knew best would now be marginalised. Moreover, states Finlay, ‘he was a total stranger to us. All we knew was stuff we didn’t like, which everyone knew, like Drumcree. But no one had ever had lunch with him, or really encountered him on a prolonged basis.’ 7 Finlay was not entirely correct: Sean O hUiginn, the head of the Anglo-Irish Affairs division at the DFA had first met Trimble almost 20 years before in the post-Vanguard period. O hUiginn had huge reservations about the conduct of Trimble at Drumcree, but also found in his election intriguing parallels with the rise of Daniel O’Connell, the leading campaigner for Catholic emancipation of the early 19th century. O hUiginn noticed that as with O’Connell, Unionists laid huge stress on how ‘articulate’ Trimble was: the classic response of a grouping which feels itself to be voiceless (the analogy held up in another way, too, since both men could be very splenetic!). 8

Trimble still saw the Republic as a political, if not a cultural enemy. 9 In the early 1970s, he thought that ‘the Republic was very close to waging proxy war against us. The role of the Irish Government in creating the Provisional IRA was the turning of blind eyes. Things changed under [the government of Liam] Cosgrave in 1974–5 and as far as the Irish public was concerned. Northern Ireland had gone off the boil and they were anxious to have things settled. The Irish state was then wholly sectarian. Changes had started with Vatican II but they were taking a long time to work their way through Irish society. Only in the last decade – partly under the influence of the divorce referendum, and the exposure of the paedophile priests – has social life ceased to be controlled by the [Catholic] Church. And then, of course, there was the embattled, declining southern Protestant community. I remember attending one Apprentice Boys of Derry function in the late 1980s at Raphoe, Co. Donegal, and them telling me “don’t end up in the same hole as us”.’ 10 Subsequently, though, in his UUP annual conference speech at Portrush, Co. Antrim, on 21 October 1995, Trimble approvingly quoted John Whyte as stating that the Republic was not merely a poorer society, but also a more unequal one on account of its retrograde housing and education policies. 11 In fact, much of Trimble’s analysis of the southern economy and society was already out of date. He tended to underrate the rise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ as a source of self-confidence to nationalists on both sides of the border, making the price which they would ask for any deal all the higher.

Such was the baggage which Trimble carried on his first visit to Dublin as leader of the UUP. There was still a degree of reticence on the Unionist side about accepting this kind of invitation. Molyneaux had gone to Dublin Castle in 1992 as part of the Strand II segment of multilateral talks, but had not gone to bilaterals with the Irish at Government Buildings, where the Taoiseach’s office is located. Indeed, not since Terence O’Neill’s meetings with the then Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, at the Mansion House in 1965, and with his successor, Jack Lynch, at Iveagh House in January 1968, had a UUP chief gone south for this sort of exchange. Again, Trimble’s purpose in so doing was to kill such taboos once and for all. 12 He wanted to do so at this particular point when he was under relatively little pressure, rather than be forced to abandon this stance under duress during a crisis in the talks. But Trimble also wanted to make another point. He wanted to be seen to be meeting first with the Taoiseach rather than Dick Spring, whose department had day-to-day responsibility for Northern Ireland. Such a meeting also contained the implicit message that Trimble was the potential Prime Minister-in-waiting of Northern Ireland, the two men dealing as equals.

After breakfasting at John Taylor’s house near Armagh, the Unionist team crossed the border. Their first task was to launch a book at the Mansion House written by two Unionist policy analysts, Esmond Birnie and Paddy Roche, entitled An Economics Lessson for Irish Nationalists and Republicans , which charged that a united Ireland made no economic sense and that the Republic in any case could not afford reintegration of the national territory. Under the gaze of Daniel O’Connell – whose portrait hangs in the Mansion House – Trimble signed the visitors’ book and wrote his address as ‘Lisburn, Co. Antrim, UK’. At the reception, afterwards, which was attended by de Rossa and the new leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, Trimble signed copies of the book. The reception had another significance in the longer run. For it was at this event that Trimble first met Eoghan Harris, the Sunday Times columnist, former Workers’ Party political strategist, and scriptwriter for the television series Sharpe. Harris describes himself as ‘a sort of Andrew Neil without the charm, a sort of Peter Mandelson without a party’, and had guided both de Rossa and Mary Robinson to their respective triumphs in the European election of 1989 and the presidential election of 1990. 13 Harris was spotted in close conversation with the UUP leader, causing one journalist to remark, ‘he’s probably looking for an advice contract. They must be the only political party who he hasn’t advised.’ ‘Who said he hasn’t?’ responded another. The reporter’s hunch was prophetic. 14

The encounter with Bruton was in and of itself relatively unmemorable. Trimble stated his belief that all-party talks could not possibly begin by the end of 1995 because of Sinn Fein/IRA’s intransigent stance on the weapons issue. Bruton found Trimble to be not particularly au fait with the nuances of southern politics, but he noted that the UUP leader was prepared to take the chance of finding out more. 15 A new channel of communication was established and regular meetings would be held in future. The media reaction was mostly positive: The Times of London speculated that Gerry Adams had met his match. 16 Mary Holland of the Irish Times was impressed by Trimble’s boldness and reckoned that because of Drumcree he now had a stock of political capital to persuade his own community that the structures of government in Northern Ireland would never again be based upon majoritarian principles. 17