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

Late on Tuesday 11 June, in his office on the fifth floor of Castle Buildings, Mayhew told Trimble of his decision. There were, he said, no alternatives to Mitchell. Trimble went silent; according to one official, the pause ‘seemed like an eternity’. 19 The UUP then withdrew to their own offices. Trimble finally decided to go along with Mitchell, but extracted a price for it. He had determined that the quid pro quo would be a blank sheet on the rules governing the talks – that is, not the Ground Rules paper nor the document of 6 June. At 5:30 p.m., Trimble visited the Irish Government’s rooms for direct talks to see if they would back this compromise. Shortly thereafter, Nora Owen and Proinsias de Rossa visited the UUP rooms and were happy to supply Trimble with the sort of reassurance he wanted. ‘The agenda is not written in stone,’ said Nora Owen. ‘That’s very interesting,’ replied the UUP leader. 20 Nigel Dodds, the then DUP party secretary, remembers Trimble moving back and forth with drafts of how the talks would be structured. ‘I’ve always made it clear I may part company with you [on the issue of the chairmanship],’ Trimble told the DUP. 21 Trimble recalls that when he kept reporting to Paisley and McCartney the nature of his conversations with the Government, the DUP leader warned him ‘to consider the personal implications of what I was doing. Up till then there had been no question of attacks.’ 22 McCartney, though, asserts that Trimble never told the other Unionist parties of his intention to accept Mitchell. 23

Even the physical imposition of Mitchell in the early hours of Wednesday 12 June had to be organised ‘like a military operation’. Mayhew feared that a hardline Unionist such as Cedric Wilson (then of the UKUP) might try to prevent Mitchell from being seated in the chair; Wilson was certainly hovering in the general vicinity. Accordingly, a politician and an official – Ancram and Stephen Leach – were deliberately sat in the co-chair before Mitchell approached the spot. Mayhew remembers propelling Mitchell by the arm into the conference room; the politician and civil servant moved only seconds before he arrived. The DUP reaction was, to say the least, forthright: Sean Farren, a senior SDLP negotiator observed in his notebook that ‘Trimble [was] taunted with remarks like “remember Brian Faulkner”.’ As hardline Unionists raged, the twelve- to fourteen-strong Irish team led by Owen and de Rossa repaired to the Anglo-Irish Secretariat to celebrate. The Irish ministers formally toasted the officials; the officials responded in kind. The seal had formally been set on a long-time Irish goal – the internationalisation of the conflict. ‘There was a huge sense of achievement,’ states Nora Owen. ‘We already had the New Ireland Forum Report [of 1984, composed of nationalist parties north and south of the border, but from which Unionists absented themselves]. But we did not have the majority community there. Now we did. Mitchell was in as chairman, with Ulster Unionist agreement and they had not walked. Without this, there would have been no process.’ 24

British ministers, such as Patrick Mayhew, were also impressed that Trimble had braved huge pressure in his own party and within the wider Unionist community. 25 But to senior officials, the events of June 1996 began to have a familiar pattern or – in the opinion of one civil servant – ‘an almost algebraic rhythm’. This ran as follows. A proposition would be put forward by the British and Irish Governments. The Alliance party and SDLP would offer broad support, though possibly not Sinn Fein. The small Loyalist parties would then often back the Government. The DUP and UKUP would express outright opposition, whilst the UUP would express grave doubts but not close the door completely. The acceptance of the proposal would then depend upon Trimble, for whom all sort of dances would have to take place till he had established his credentials within the wider Unionist community; only then could he proceed. 26 But how much did this approach profit him? Trimble was under no doubt that it had brought about substantive gains. He had obtained his blank sheets on the rules for the talks. The all-powerful chairman, as envisaged in the two Governments’ paper of 6 June, would now be more of a facilitator than an enforcer – or, in John Taylor’s revised description of Mitchell, ‘a Serb with no powers is acceptable’. 27 Trimble noted with pleasure to how he had shaved the Governments down. In the first Irish draft, the Government of the Republic proposed that ‘the two Governments with the assistance of the chairmen will consult the parties’; the UUP objected. In the second, the Irish suggested ‘the chairmen, with the assistance of the two Governments will confer with the parties’. Again, it was rejected by the UUP. The third draft read: ‘The chairmen, the two Governments and the parties will confer.’ Trimble accepted this version.

But Trimble’s Unionist critics (and the SDLP) regarded his victories as the window-dressing – the illusion of control rather than the reality. According to this analysis, the two Governments were perfectly prepared to let the parties mess around with the small change of the talks once the big accounts had been settled, notably with nationalist Ireland and the United States. Decommissioning had again been postponed. Mitchell came with the blessing of the President of the United States: his mere presence was enough to constrict the UUP leader’s room for manoeuvre. For once the prestige of the American Commander-in-Chief was bound up with the process, it would be ever harder for Ulster Unionists to walk away. For all of the reassurance offered to Trimble about his role, Mitchell was not insulated from the presidential election and he even played the role of Clinton’s Republican opponent, Senator Robert Dole, in the mock debates that preceded the live television exchanges between the two nominees in October 1996. 28 And although Mitchell had not disavowed his own report of January 1996, he moved on with the intergovernmental consensus – which entailed constant dilution of the timing of its provisions.

Above all, Mitchell personified the internationalisation of the conflict. As Peter Bell observes, all players in the Ulster crisis increasingly looked towards the United States. ‘We are now rather like those minor east Asian potentates described in Polybius’ history of Republican Rome,’ he states. ‘There we are, in that neo-classical setting in Rome on the Potomac, imploring Senators for favours.’ 29 Irish nationalists might not have obtained all that they wanted, but the appointment of Mitchell and the willingness of Trimble to fracture the Unionist bloc could be represented as gains nonetheless. To northern nationalists such as Sean Farren, it was a far cry from the Unionist stance of 1996 and that of 1991–2, when they still regarded political discussions over the future of Northern Ireland as essentially an internal United Kingdom matter. 30 And to obtain revision of the rules, they had even turned to the Irish Government, further legitimising the southern role. Above all, it was done with the agreement of one man, David Trimble, who a mere six years earlier had been standing on the roof of Glengall Street protesting against the visit of the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey. Paisley was in no doubts as to what the events of that night meant. ‘That’s it,’ he told his party colleagues in the DUP room at Stormont. ‘There’s going to be an agreement now. Our task is to ensure that the people outside know what is going on and we keep Trimble to what he said. But he won’t work with us any more.’ 31

THE praise bestowed upon Trimble by ‘world opinion’ for his statesmanship in helping to seat Mitchell proved short-lived. The reason could be summarised in two words: Drumcree II. Trimble’s Unionist critics saw the new, unprecedented levels of opprobrium that were heaped upon him for his role in the Drumcree stand-off as all too predictable. They felt that it illustrated the pointlessness of basing key political decisions on the need to propitiate the ‘international community’. Unionists only ever won plaudits for the concessions they made; by contrast, any attempt to stand up for their vital interests in a vicious inter-communal conflict was regarded by many ‘right-thinking’ people as the moral equivalent of such IRA atrocities as the South Quay bombing. According to this analysis, Unionists should just concentrate on defending their way of life – since good PR came at a price and of its nature could never endure. Indeed, men like William Ross believed good PR was like a monster which had endlessly to be fed and which would end up devouring the traditional Ulster-British way of life. 1 From a very different perspective, Frank Millar of the Irish Times also wondered whether the UUP leader had not blown a golden opportunity in taking the stance that he did during Drumcree II. As he saw it, there was a brief window of opportunity in the Republic, where opinion had turned against Sinn Fein after a series of terrorist attacks. These included the killing of Garda McCabe on 7 June and the bombing of Manchester on 15 June. 2