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

But such calculations seemed at the time to be far removed from the real world of life in Portadown. There, tensions had once again reached fever pitch over the planned Orange march down the Garvaghy Road. For although Trimble liked to take the long view, especially now that he was leader of the UUP, he could not overlook the obvious: he was still the MP for the area, and no politician likes to say goodbye to a substantial portion of his electorate unless he absolutely has to do so. But it was very much a role thrust upon him – and it was a duty which the new, emerging Trimble scarcely relished. Indeed, Harold Gracey recalled that between July 1995 and July 1996, he hardly heard from Trimble, even though everyone knew the crisis was bound to come. 3 There is other evidence that Trimble simply did not want to deal with the issue at all until he was forced to address it. The Garvaghy Road Residents Group claims that they wrote three times to Trimble in 1995–6 requesting talks to avoid a repetition of the stand-off, but received no reply. Trimble now states that his failure to respond owes something to laziness: he would have to have replied himself and would not have relished a correspondence which would have taken on the air of a debate. This last point was a source of frustration to him. He felt constrained by the rut into which loyalists had inserted themselves by adopting the tactic of not talking to the Residents Group – which in his opinion was then exploited by their wider republican enemies as evidence of intransigence. 4 Since the option of talking to the residents was not open to him at this stage – indeed, he did not dare do so till 1999, well after he entered face-to-face negotiation with Sinn Fein/IRA’s leadership – he may well have wanted to avoid thinking about a tricky subject which he could not even handle on his own preferred terms. 5 Indeed, many of the local Orangemen treated him as if he was one of their own in the security forces, such as the RUC Reserve and Royal Irish Regiment, and would not tell him the game plan. Gordon Lucy confirms that Trimble had remarkably little to do with the extensive Orange planning and preparations for the 1996 stand-off (by comparison, 1995 was a spontaneous protest). 6

Trimble was in Stirling on Saturday 6 July for the Boyne anniversary Orange walk, as a guest of the County Lodge of Central Scotland, when his mobile telephone rang with dramatic news: the Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Hugh Annesley, had decided to re-route the march. Until the last minute the UUP leader had been hopeful that the march could be taken down the road quickly and quietly. 7 Annesley stated that purely operational considerations governed his decision, but few Orangemen believed him – and in this crisis it was again perceptions which counted for most on both sides. Trimble spoke for the Loyalist mainstream when he asserted incorrectly that the decision was taken by ‘those members of the RUC who regularly visited the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in the run-up to the decision … I think the strategists of the Department of Foreign Affairs believed, if Orangeism could be faced down during this summer, this would create a situation in which Sinn Fein could be enticed into talks.’ 8 Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme on the following Monday, he warned that Annesley’s decision was ‘placing at risk the tranquillity we have enjoyed over recent months’, a comment which Lucy says was principally construed as a reference to the fragility of the loyalist ceasefire. 9 For this act of ‘scaremongering’, Trimble was criticised by Gary McMichael of the Ulster Democratic Party, the political wing of the UDA: ’I don’t think they [the UUP leadership] should be talking about the loyalist ceasefire being broken…[loyalist paramilitaries] shouldn’t be prompted by people like David Trimble.’ 10 Annesley later said that Mayhew offered him no advice on Drumcree. Annesley told him that either of the two options could potentially lead to disorder. 11 Yet Annesley’s ban did not find particular favour in the NIO, illustrating that the decision to re-route was not taken because of instructions emanating directly from the intergovernmental conference. ‘The Chief Constable took a principled decision,’ opines one senior civil servant but ‘It was not pragmatic and the result was near civil war.’ 12 Sir John Wheeler remembers that even if Mayhew had been motivated by a political agenda relating to obtaining a new IRA ceasefire (the prospect of which appeared to have receded in recent weeks, anyhow) the Secretary of State would always have been hamstrung by his lawyerly belief in the constitutional proprieties concerning operational independence of the Chief Constable. Wheeler does, though, confirm the accuracy of one of Trimble’s contentions, that the Irish DFA wanted the Orangemen to be taught a lesson. ‘It was implicit in their arguments that we would have to do whatever was necessary to keep them from going down the road,’ says the former Security Minister. ‘Though it was never explicitly stated, it was implicit in the course of action that they were urging upon us that we would have to shoot down our countrymen if necessary!’ 13

It was into this seething cauldron that Trimble returned on Sunday 7 July. He left his RUC personal protection unit at Carleton Street – they could not accompany him to an Orange event – and joined the brethren in the field; that night, he slept on the floor in the church hall at Drumcree. An amazing cross-section of Ulster society was to be found resting there that night, including the Star of David Girls’ Accordion Band! 14 But one innovation enabled him to stay in touch with the wider world in a way that had not been possible in the previous year. In the intervening months, he bought a mobile telephone, which became a kind of omnipresent trademark. By Sunday night, it was estimated that 10,000 Orangemen had turned up out of solidarity. The RUC was starting to feel stretched. Road blocks disappeared as swiftly as they emerged; on Monday evening alone, they would have to police 230 small to medium-sized parades. The atmosphere swiftly darkened, rioting occurred overnight in Belfast, Ballymena, Carrickfergus, Londonderry and Portadown. The next morning, the body of Lurgan taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick – a 36-year-old Catholic, newly graduated from Queen’s, with one child and a pregnant wife – was found in his cab near Aghalee, Co. Antrim: he had been shot twice in the head. 15 No one claimed responsibility. Trimble said that ‘if it should turn out to be a sectarian murder, it will be condemned unreservedly’. He went further: ‘This is the sort of thing we don’t want to see. It is just the sort of thing that we have repeatedly appealed to persons in paramilitaries not to do.’ 16 Not everyone was as robust. David Ervine of the PUP-UVF initially said that his party did not engage in the ‘politics of condemnation’ – reminiscent of the formula sometimes employed by republican spokesmen when commenting upon IRA actions. 17 Suspicion immediately focused upon the highly independent mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF, headed by the dissident Portadown loyalist, Billy Wright. Later, McGoldrick’s family claimed that ‘fire and brimstone speeches’ and ‘loose talk’ by politicians had partly been responsible for the taxi driver’s death. 18

As the protests mounted, Trimble wrote to George Mitchell to inform him of the UUP’s withdrawal from the talks until the authorities ‘come to their senses’. 19 The M1 and A1 were blocked, and Aldergrove airport was sealed off. Eventually, Larne harbour closed as well. David Kerr recalls driving with Trimble to a meeting with Mayhew in Belfast: shortly after they turned off the Birches roundabout on to the M1, the UUP leader saw three plumes of smoke rising eerily in the distance. ‘That’s Lurgan, that’s Portadown, that’s Craigavon,’ he noted. 20 At one point, David Campbell, a young Orangeman who was organising the protests in Lagan Valley met with Trimble and John Hunter by the Drumcree church hall. Campbell noted the support that the demonstrations enjoyed. ‘Give the word, the people are there and willing to do it,’ Campbell told the UUP leader. ‘Let’s take the country.’ 21 According to Hunter, Trimble gulped at that moment. 22 And he added: ‘No, we don’t need to do that.’ 23