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

Trimble decided straight after the South Quay bomb to head to the United States to brief Clinton on what had happened, taking the advice of John Holmes, the Prime Minister’s new Private Secretary before he did so. When Ken Maginnis and Donaldson arrived at the White House on Monday 12 February at 2 p.m. they found a President who seemed ill at ease. Trimble said he was surprised at the timing of the bomb. ‘Yeah, it was stupid, damned stupid,’ lamented the Commander-in-Chief, referring to the fact that the blast took place at the very moment that there was a chance of all-party talks. But Trimble says he never asked Clinton to place the Provisionals beyond the pale at this moment: ‘They [the US Administration] know best what leverage they have,’ Trimble explains. ‘There is no point in telling them what to do.’ 15 He shares the conventional British wisdom that this blast came as a tremendous shock to Clinton, thus prompting a reappraisal of White House attitudes towards Northern Ireland. In fact, Trimble’s recollection is not quite correct: he asked that Adams’ visa to the USA be rescinded and that there be a ban on fundraising by Sinn Fein, but both these options were rejected by the US Administration. Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, rejected this reasoning, stating that ‘Mr Adams is an important leader in this process because he speaks for Sinn Fein. It is hard to imagine a process making progress towards peace without the active involvement of Sinn Fein.’ Partly, the White House’s unwillingness to place Adams beyond the pale can be ascribed to the fact that the British Government did not want to do so, either: they favoured Adams’ admission to the USA and for the doors then partially to close on him as a sign of displeasure as exemplified by the Sinn Fein president’s exclusion from the annual St Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Trimble did, however, attend a dinner of the American-Ireland Fund on St Patrick’s Day at which Gerry Adams was present – another small breach in the wall of taboos surrounding the republicans (Trimble had initially not wanted to attend, but feared the consequences of ‘exclusion’ if he did not turn up). 16

Once the immediate shock of the South Quay bomb had passed, the attention of the political classes on both sides of the Irish Sea moved to the form of election to the new assembly and to the format of the talks. Trimble and the UUP did relatively badly in this. Indeed, Andrew Hunter noted in his diary of 21 February 1996 that ‘Secretary of State [Mayhew] worried about the case for elections to a Peace Convention. Believes it is difficult to find solid, objective justification. Michael Ancram and I argued that elections justified on pragmatic grounds; no other way to get Unionists into all-party negotiations … Not much optimism in our discussion. Implicit agreement that PM overegged elections in his Mitchell response.’ Yet Trimble was himself partly responsible for affording the British Government the space which it needed to make the elective process ‘work’ vis-à-vis nationalist Ireland. As early as 24 December 1995, he had suggested in a Sunday Tribune interview that the assembly ‘could take evidence from the Republic, from the Irish Government and other interested bodies’ about possible North-South cooperation. The new body would not be a recreation of Stormont, he noted, but rather would be time-limited to two years (though it was a point which he never had much success in conveying). Trimble’s proposal was very considerably short of joint management of the talks but Irish offficials approvingly noted the UUP leader’s flexibility. Later, Trimble indicated that if the questions were framed in the right way and if it was clear that it was not an island-wide referendum, he might under certain circumstances back John Hume’s idea of a plebiscite in both jurisdictions simultaneous with an assembly election (concerning the right of the Irish people, north and south, to self-determination and their right also to determine the method whereby that might be achieved). There was, of course, another imperative behind his need to obtain an elective process: Trimble says that if he won an election, he would greatly increase his authority within the UUP. 17

Trimble’s position within the UUP helps to explain his concerns about nationalist successes in diluting the Assembly idea: he was worried at least as much by the appearance as the substance. In a memorandum to Major, dated 22 February, entitled ‘UU outline talks scheme’, Trimble stated that there was some limited flexibility on when the Provisionals could begin decommissioning – effectively a green light to the British Government considering the other pressures on them. But on the presentation, there was no such hint of flexibility: ‘The announcement of the elections for the Peace Convention and the associated talks should avoid the usual Anglo/Irish style, i.e. it should avoid the language typical of Stormont Castle/Iveagh House joint productions,’ stated Trimble. ‘There should be no references to the two Governments jointly sponsoring or jointly managing the Peace Convention or the talks.’ In the end, the Ground Rules for Substantive All-Party Negotiations paper produced by the British Government in March 1996 gave precisely that impression: to the intense annoyance of Trimble, it was sent out while the Unionist leader was in America and suggested that the Irish Government be the joint coordinator of the negotiations. 18

The crucial next step of setting a date for all-party talks was complicated – and dramatically so – by the Government’s parlous position in the Commons. Lord Justice Scott’s report on the Arms for Iraq affair was scheduled for debate on 26 February 1996. If the Government was defeated in the House, it would trigger a vote of no confidence. Not all Conservative MPs were solidly behind the Government and attention again focused on the Unionists’ intentions. From the Conservative Government’s viewpoint, the initial signs were not hopeful. In an interview with Roy Hattersley, Trimble had told the former Labour deputy leader that he was appalled by the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates (the gagging orders produced by the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, which were said to have prevented ministers from revealing information on national security grounds that would have shown that the defendants in the Matrix Churchill case had acted with the state’s approval). 19 He was thus less worried by the Government’s Iraq policy than by the fact that innocent men might have gone to jail for raison d’état. No less important, the former law lecturer believed that Lyell gave poor legal advice – and had stated as much as early as the original debate on the Arms for Iraq affair in November 1992. 20

But Trimble could not now afford the indulgence of thinking like some independent-minded backbencher. The UUP’s stance would have also to be based upon the Realpolitik of Unionist interests. It was a close call. On the one hand, Trimble was dubious about how much he could extract from a weak Government. ‘Major can’t deliver much on his own,’ he told Hattersley. ‘[I would prefer] a strong Government with the confidence to take difficult decisions.’ Hattersley stated that Trimble did not believe that such a Government existed then. ‘Ireland [sic] cannot go right for Major in any big way before the election,’ predicted the UUP leader. ‘It can only go wrong. That means that we are likely to have another year of stalemate.’ 21 On the other hand, although Trimble may then have felt that the prospect of New Labour was more congenial, there was still much short-term business to be transacted with the Conservatives (whom Labour would broadly back as part of the bi-partisan approach towards Northern Ireland). The most immediate item on the agenda was the method of election to the new body proposed by Trimble: he feared that the Government was at this stage leaning to a variant of the DUP’s preferred system (which, for a variety of complex reasons, also benefited the SDLP and thus mitigated nationalist hostility). The Paisleyites wanted a Province-wide poll based on a party list system, as in the European Parliamentary elections, which was well suited to maximising the large personal vote of their chief who would then barn-storm the Province. The Ulster Unionists, by contrast, wanted a single transferable vote in the constituencies, which would maximise their greater strength in depth further down the ticket. If a Paisley-friendly system emerged, it could conceivably destroy Trimble and inflict a serious blow to his conception of New Unionism. His fears of a deal were confirmed when one colleague heard from Paisley himself that the three DUP MPs would not enter either lobby for the Scott vote; indeed, Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, recalls that the Government communicated via NIO civil servants that an electoral system more in line with DUP needs would be introduced – though, as he points out, the linkage was hinted at rather than being ‘crudely made’. 22 Trimble believes that the NIO has quietly favoured the DUP over the years as a means of weakening the solidarity of the Unionist bloc and specifically of its largest component, the UUP. But perhaps of greatest significance to the Government was the fact that the DUP might potentially participate in such a representative institution with Sinn Fein at some point in the future – assuming there was a ceasefire and that republicans would then take up their seats in such a body. Quentin Thomas had been impressed from the early to mid-1990s by the point made to him by senior DUP politicians that they could not voluntarily agree to share power with nationalists; but, they added, if such an outcome was forced upon them and sanctioned by a particular kind of electoral process (as on District Councils, where committee chairmanships were shared out proportionately according to party strengths) then the DUP would not decline to fulfil their democratic mandate and take up their allocated slots. 23