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

AT 7:02 p.m. on Friday, 9 February, the British and Irish official elites were assembling for pre-prandial drinks at the Foreign Office conference facility at Wilton Park. At that precise moment, a massive bomb detonated at South Quay in London’s Docklands, ending the IRA ceasefire. Within minutes, the news had been relayed to Ted Barrington, the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. Barrington told his fellow guest, Quentin Thomas, what had occurred. The Political Director of the NIO was stunned. So, too, was Martin Mansergh, special adviser to successive leaders of Fianna Fail. The next day, he paced around the gardens, alone, seemingly in a state of shock. The attempt to draw this generation of republicans into constitutional politics – one of his life’s main goals – appeared for the time being to be in ruins. According to Thomas, the two men had spoken a few minutes earlier, when Mansergh had expressed optimism about the future. 1 Meanwhile, John Major was in his Huntingdon constituency when the news came to the No. 10 switchboard at 6 p.m. that RTE had received a call from the IRA stating that the ceasefire was over: the codeword was genuine. 2 The White House rang shortly thereafter to say that Adams had called with the same information. According to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the Sinn Fein President was ‘elliptical and sounded concerned. But we didn’t know what he meant. And I still don’t know whether he knew what was going to happen.’ 3 At Stormont House in Belfast, Sir John Wheeler, the Security Minister at the NIO, was making his way through paperwork: it was his turn to be the duty minister. His Private Secretary immediately came on the line with the news. Wheeler stayed up till 1 a.m., reintroducing many of the security measures withdrawn after the ceasefire began. 4

But despite the shock of the South Quay bomb, the British state did not alter course: there was no fundamental reappraisal of the nature of republicanism. Wheeler says that at no stage did the Government even contemplate the notion that there should be anything other than an inclusive settlement so long as the IRA was on some kind of ceasefire; or, as Cranborne puts it, ‘it was treated almost as though it was a cri de coeur from a delinquent teenager rather than a full-scale assault on British democracy’. 5 Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary of 21 February 1996 that even as Mayhew expected another IRA ‘spectacular’ on the mainland, the Government still were looking for signals that some kind of process was possible. Indeed, one senior NIO official was shocked within weeks of the blast to find the Government negotiating again with Sinn Fein: he concluded from this episode that if even a Conservative ministry with a narrow majority could do such a thing, then a serious question mark had been placed against the viability of the Union. The official was therefore prepared to toy with the idea that negotiating a federal Ireland was a possible means of ‘getting the Provisionals off the Prods’ backs’ and to minimise their leverage over the system. 6

John Steele, the then Director of Security in the NIO, states that as he saw it, ‘the IRA were cracking the whip. They were demonstrating that bad things could happen. But the break in the ceasefire was a carefully calculated signal, not a wild lashing-out.’ Steele recalls that even Wheeler – the minister most sceptical of the IRA – only wanted to respond with enhanced intelligence gathering. The Security Minister suggested neither the reintroduction of internment, nor did he advocate letting the SAS use lethal force. 7 Nor were the prisoners released during the first ceasefire recalled, and the border was not sealed. Mary Holland correctly observed the ‘surprisingly mild’ response to that atrocity. ‘We heard almost nothing from the British side about the spirit of the bulldog breed,’ she noted in her Irish Times column of 29 February.

The British were convinced that such measures would prove counterproductive at home and abroad. At home, they concluded, it could be a recruiting sergeant for the IRA. Abroad, principally in America, old-style counter-insurgency was deemed diplomatically too costly – even if set in the context of an overall ‘carrot and stick’ approach to the republican movement. Thus, Cranborne also had no purist scruples about offering the republicans the ‘carrot’ of political development – provided they were prepared to abandon armed struggle entirely. But he also believed that the political forms of the ‘stick’ were not being employed properly either. He therefore sent Major ‘an intemperate memo’ suggesting that the Government was totally inactive in trying to defeat the IRA. Cranborne wanted ‘to put our money where our mouth is and appoint a counter-terrorist supremo in the Cabinet in charge of winning it on all levels’. This supremo would be responsible to the Prime Minister, special Cabinet committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee of the Commons. Cranborne knew that the ‘mandarinate’ would oppose his plans, on the grounds that they would cut across existing lines of departmental reponsibility and chains of command in the security forces and the police (although the creation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had shown that there was scope for innovation). Major was deeply uncomfortable with the idea and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, shot it down completely. Butler and Major met with Cranborne and instead offered improved intelligence coordination but no radical overhaul. 8

Curiously, for all his rhetoric, David Trimble did not really push a return to an old-style security crackdown; nor, even then, did he think that the republican movement would necessarily be beyond the pale in the future. Mayhew notes that Trimble did not ask the Government to scrap the ‘peace process’ as a concept now clearly based upon false premises. ‘I think he always had it in his mind to do something more than spend the whole of his political career leading a minority party in the Commons,’ says the former Secretary of State. 9 Fergus Finlay also states that Trimble never asked the Irish Government to endorse the concept of a deal without Sinn Fein: without them, Finlay believes, the UUP leader could never realise his ambition to be Prime Minister of a stable Northern Ireland. 10 Again, this was partly because Trimble felt that the British state from the outset was not going to place republicans beyond the pale, and would work tirelessly to restore the broken ceasefire. Indeed, Major told Trimble that the decision to return to armed struggle was taken by a curiously informal grouping of 20 senior republicans and not through the more ‘formal’ mechanisms of the IRA Army Council; the actual operation was run by a very tight group based in the Republic, not involving Northern Irish ‘assets’, though some of the participants were northerners. Trimble drew the inference that the South Quay bomb may not have been the settled view of the whole organisation. Indeed, he says that there are many unanswered questions about the role of Adams and McGuinness in that bombing. 11 On 1 March 1996, Trimble told the Irish News that if there were to be an IRA ceasefire which means ‘a change of heart’ he would not want to create ‘unnecessary obstacles about Sinn Fein’s involvement in all-party talks’. All he asked for was adherence to the terms of the Mitchell Report. ‘Mitchell does talk about parallel decommissioning, not prior decommissioning. If we had reasonable commitments we would be able to move in that direction.’ 12

In his first lengthy disquisition on the end of the ceasefire, published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday February 12, Trimble stated that the purpose of the bombing was to stop elections to his proposed body from taking place. This later turned out to be unlikely, for the simple reason that the IRA’s decision to return to ‘war’ was taken well before the Forum idea was accepted by the British Government. But whatever the real reasons for their actions, it was certainly inept of Trimble to identify this as a cause of the bomb: it implicitly validated the nationalist notion that Major’s actions in ‘binning’ Mitchell and alighting upon the glancing reference in the International Body’s Report to the elective route had in some way precipitated South Quay. But did the IRA resumption of violence work from their perspective? Many in nationalist Ireland, and not a few Unionists, certainly believed as much, pointing to the announcement of all-party talks made on 28 February 1996 at Downing Street by Major and Bruton. 13 Bruton disagrees with this notion, observing that the decision to set a date for such negotiations had been taken in principle when the British Government accepted Mitchell as Commission chairman in November 1994. Bruton also notes that the log-jam on prior decommissioning had already been broken by the elective route of the Forum: he feels that Trimble received insufficient credit for this idea. 14 But the manner and timing of the announcement of a date for all-party talks made it appear as though the Provisionals had ‘put manners’ on the two Governments.