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

Holland also restated nationalist fears that John Bruton would be seduced by Trimble. But were these justified? Bruton, who was elected as the youngest TD in the Dail for his native Meath in 1969 was not merely the guardian of Fine Gael tradition – the party which founded the state and set up the institutions of law and order. Bruton’s own origins lay in the Centre Party, one of the successors to John Redmond’s Irish Party which until its final eclipse in the 1918 General Election at the hands of the old Sinn Fein had demanded Home Rule for Ireland within the United Kingdom (a picture of Redmond even hung above Bruton’s desk, and he enthusiastically devoured Paul Bew’s rehabilitation of Redmondism, Ideology and the Irish Question , of which he had been given a leather-bound edition by his officials for his 48th birthday in 1995). One of the sources of Bruton’s visceral anti-nationalism was the death of one of his closest friends, Senator Billy Fox. Fox was a Protestant legislator from Co. Monaghan who had been murdered by the Provisionals in 1974 whilst visiting his girlfriend (Bruton recalled the episode to effect in his debate on RTE with Ahern during the 1997 general election: Bruton also was advised by the ubiquitous Eoghan Harris). 18 This episode inevitably informed his dealings with republicans. Bruton declined to give ‘sectarian coalitions’ public recognition of the kind which Albert Reynolds accorded them, notably the dramatic three-way handshake between that Fianna Fail Taioseach and Hume and Adams on the steps of Government Buildings in Dublin in September 1994. 19

Whatever Bruton’s own views, he was leader of an unlikely agglomeration known as the Rainbow Coalition – comprising Spring’s Labour party and de Rossa’s Democratic Left. Dick Spring as Minister of Foreign Affairs was much the most important since he ran Northern Ireland policy on a day-to-day basis. Spring came from a staunchly republican family in Tralee, Co. Kerry, and had inherited his seat in the Dail from his father, Dan: Spring père had been a staunch supporter of Charlie Kerins, a senior IRA figure executed in Mountjoy jail by the de Valera government in 1944 for murdering a Garda Sergeant. 20 Spring, a former rugby international, saw his own role in the government as a balancing act – not unlike the former West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the FDP, who switched from supporting the SPD of Helmut Schmidt to the CDU/CSU bloc of Helmut Kohl in 1982. He acted as a restraint on the instincts of the Fianna Fail-led Government of Albert Reynolds (backing the idea of a ‘suspension’ of the AIA in 1992 to make it easier for Unionists to enter into three-stranded talks); after moving over to a Bruton-led coalition in late 1994, many saw him as rectifying the new Taoiseach’s instinctive sympathy for Unionism and keeping republicans on board. The policy of the Irish state was largely settled, so any ‘innovations’ by Spring were as much about presentation as about substance. Trimble certainly genuinely disliked what he saw as Spring’s excessive solicitude for the republicans; but it was also because he felt the excessively ‘green’ spin which the Tanaiste and DFA officials placed on events made it that much harder for him to nudge the unionist community into accepting the full logic of the three-stranded process.

Trimble was thus enraged when Spring told the UN General Assembly on 27 September 1995 that it was time for the British Government to abandon its insistence on a handover of IRA weapons ahead of all-party talks. 21 And writing in the Irish Times on the morning of his first meeting in Dublin, Trimble stated that the British Government was now taking a principled stance on the issue of decommissioning. ‘Wobbling out on a limb, however, is the Tanaiste, Mr Dick Spring, who appears to have “gone native” with the zealots in the DFA and is now demanding that the IRA be allowed into all-party talks without the removal of any weapons or a commitment to permanent peace…’ Trimble’s dislike of the DFA was shared by almost all Unionists. An elite corps of over 300 diplomats, the DFA was quite unlike any other foreign ministry in the world. In most countries, foreign ministries are the least nationalistic of government departments. In Ireland, it is the most nationalistic (its foil is the Department of Finance, whose culture on northern questions is partly informed by a dread of paying for the absorption of Ulster into the Republic). 22 Certainly, Trimble felt that until the Ahern era, ‘the DFA’s policy was that Ulster is the fourth green field [the term given to the four Provinces of Ireland, only three of which, in the view of nationalists, have been liberated]’. In Trimble’s view, they always ran rings around British officials – not because of superior ability, but simply because they were convinced of the rightness of their cause and were comparatively guilt-free. In particular, Trimble disliked the DFA’s leading light, Sean O hUiginn, head of the Anglo-Irish division since 1991: he believes that O hUiginn’s departure for the United States as Irish ambassador in September 1997 enormously improved the atmosphere in the talks. 23 Whatever the accuracy of Trimble’s assessment of O hUiginn’s position, the DFA often were able to ‘punch above their weight’. They may not have enjoyed the resources of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, nor of the British intelligence services, but they secured results because, in the words of one Irish minister, ‘they are driven by the zeal of the second division side seeking to knock a premier division club out of the cup in a local derby’. Moreover, because the Irish state is small and has relatively few crucial policy objectives compared to the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland, EU budgets and the maintenance of neutrality – its very best servants can specialise in these areas.

It was Trimble’s belief that no meaningful dialogue was possible with Spring which made him so reluctant to meet him on a regular basis. This view was widely held in the UUP, and was most memorably expressed by John Taylor who pronounced Spring to be ‘the most detested politician in Northern Ireland’: Trimble says that once his deputy started the name-calling, he could not very well repudiate him (Nora Owen claims that Trimble always behaved differently when Taylor was present and was much more hardline). 24 In the end, says Fergus Finlay, Spring decided to put up with the abuse for the sake of the peace process. The first bilateral between the two was duly held at Glengall Street in late October 1995. Finlay remembers that it was a surreal occasion, and that Trimble made only one reference to past attacks. ‘You and I are men of affairs,’ Trimble intoned, ‘and you recognise that these are things that have to be said to satisfy one’s public.’ 25 Indeed so: Trimble needed the bogeyman of Spring to afford cover for his overtures to the south, although his dislike of the Tanaiste was genuine enough. Finlay remembers that Trimble was constantly interrupted by Ken Maginnis and hardly spoke for the rest of the meeting. 26 Finlay reckoned that Trimble was devoting far more time and attention to his position as the leader of Ulster Unionism than to his relations with both the British and Irish Governments. Finlay’s problem with Trimble was not so much that the UUP leader had to engage in such posturing, but rather that he was much ruder than he needed to be in order to achieve the desired effect in his own community. In that sense, he was utterly different from the courteous Molyneaux. From Finlay’s viewpoint, this was not necessarily bad for the ‘peace process’. Molyneaux was exquisitely polite, but impossible to pin down; whereas Trimble could be very discourteous, but was at least ‘engaged’. 27

Given such antipathy, it was scarcely surprising that Trimble should persist in his efforts to cultivate Bruton and to sideline Spring. Trimble sought to work on a back-channel via Paddy Teahon, Secretary-General of the Taoiseach’s Department. But the DFA soon got wind of the UUP’s attempted approaches and immediately contacted the Taoiseach’s Department and any such proposed back-channel of communication was soon terminated. 28 Thereafter, it was all done on a more formal basis. Partly, it was a turf war within the Irish Government, but there was also a genuine fear in the DFA that to give such recognition so soon to the Bruton – Trimble relationship would elevate the UUP leader to such a level as to make him less willing to make concessions to northern nationalists. As they saw it, the full fruits of such summitry should be bestowed after a deal, not beforehand. In any case, they feared an unstructured dialogue when no one was clear as to Trimble’s ultimate intentions. Did he, for example, really want to be Prime Minister of a new Northern Ireland (in the sense of being willing to pay a price on Strand II to achieve his Strand I objectives)? For, if not, there was a real danger that Trimble would simply ‘pocket’ the meeting, return to Northern Ireland and proclaim ‘I’ve confronted the lion in his den’ – thus humiliating the Taoiseach in exchange for nothing. Far better, some DFA officials reasoned, slowly to ‘sus’ him out. In this respect, the state of knowledge amongst the British about Trimble’s goals was rather more accurate than their Irish counterparts; many of them were worried by the failure of the southerners and Trimble to forge a satisfactory relationship, which made a settlement that much more remote. Indeed, much as John Bruton tried to reassure Trimble that the Republic was not on for a tribal adventure and sought only stability, the UUP leader never felt that he could risk doing the deal in these circumstances. This was because in his view Bruton did not fully control his own coalition government’s policy towards Northern Ireland and could only intervene from time to time – an impression that was reinforced by Trimble’s trips south of the border. 29 If Fine Gael came to an accommodation with the Unionists (which would inevitably include a referendum on the revision of Articles 2 and 3) they would always be vulnerable to accusations from Fianna Fail that they had betrayed the nation. Even though Bruton instinctively wanted no part of the pan-nationalist front, the fact remained that no Taoiseach could shun Sinn Fein/IRA once the ‘peace process’ had started. ‘As Sinn Fein saw it, the pan-nationalist front meant that the Irish Government would act as buffer and conduit for their views rather than behaving with a mind of its own,’ says Finlay. ‘In their analysis there were only two protagonists of significance in this conflict, themselves and the British.’ Finlay recalls that in discussions with the Irish Government, they displayed little interest in the evolution of Unionist politics, such as Trimble’s election as leader (a point confirmed by British ministers and officials of the period). Certainly, the traditional republican view of Unionists and Unionism was dismissive. According to this line of reasoning, Loyalism was a mere creation of British imperialism. These local surrogates would disappear once their colonial paymasters in metropolitan Britain faced them down, forcing them into an agonising reappraisal of where their true interests lay. But republicans were coming to a more nuanced, if no less hostile view of their neighbours. Thus, the pseudonymous Hilda Mac Thomas, commenting on Trimble’s election as leader in the Sinn Fein newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News on 14 September 1995, was noticeably free of the sanctimonious and disapproving tone which characterised the reactions of some constitutional nationalists and much of Ulster’s chattering classes. Whether or not Trimble forged a pan-unionist front with other loyalist parties, it concluded, ‘this does not change the context in which [he] has got to work … The question is, will Trimble push his party in the same cul-de-sac, or will he be the one to lead them to a new agreement with the people in Ireland. An even more presssing question for him will be that of preventing the fragmentation of the Official Unionist Party [sic], as those unionists who would have adopted a more pragmatic line leave or are edged out.’ In retrospect, Hilda Mac Thomas was only really incorrect on the last point, for if anything it has been anti-Agreement Unionists who have been ‘purged’ (and then without much efficiency).