Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 18

TRIMBLE’S first major speech after assuming the Unionist leadership was to address a reception on the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the UUC. Gordon Lucy was summoned to help and assumed that it would be an historical tour d’horizon concerning Unionism past, present and future. He was not merely to be disappointed, but shocked when Trimble informed him that he was thinking of ‘bringing in the Provisionals from the cold’; shortly thereafter, John Hunter was told much the same. Hunter listened and says that he took this to be simply a throw-away remark. Trimble says that he did not quite say this: he was just trying to urge his party ‘not to display the usual stock hostility to [republicans] and all their works’. Whatever the actual content or significance of the remark, Trimble’s line of thinking ultimately led to a series of breaches between both men and the UUP leader.¹ Trimble’s chosen first step for accomplishing the task of weaning the republicans off violence was an elected forum. On the night of the address, at the Balmoral conference centre in south Belfast, Trimble reiterated his public position on decommissioning. Then, he added: ‘It could be that both these matters could be resolved in the one way. Sinn Fein could obtain a democratic mandate and show a commitment to the democratic process if there were elections, say, to a new Assembly. By standing, taking their seats and contributing to the debate they could show whether they are committed to the democratic process and the principle of consent. In such elections it would be very interesting to see what support Sinn Fein actually has. If they took their seats we would recognise their position and could debate with them across the floor and thus talk to them at a time when they have not fulfilled all the requirements of the Declaration and thus be unable to move into formal inter-party talks. An Assembly could bridge that gap until they do meet the requirements of the [Downing Street] Declaration.’² The address was classic Trimble and it pointed up the complexity of Trimble’s actions. For although he disclaimed any intention to recreate Stormont, Trimble saw merit in facilitating dialogue with Sinn Fein in an inherently partitionist body. If they did so, all well and good; but, if not, then their refusal to accept Northern Ireland as the relevant political unit (and thus the consent principle) would be apparent to all. It would stop the obsessive concentration on decommissioning. But Trimble also thought that such a forum could provide a training ground for the younger Unionist cadres whose aspirations were stymied by the current political arrangements. Local government was so powerless as to offer little to any rising stars; and members of the ageing parliamentary party at Westminster showed scant inclination to retire.³

Trimble recalls that the speech caused excitement in No. 10: Downing Street was looking for flexibility and his speech afforded them the necessary space to ‘get off the prior decommissioning hook’. But the reaction elsewhere was less favourable. William Ross, who was listening with his wife Christine, was shocked. ‘Did he say what I think he said?’ she inquired. ‘And where does this leave us?’ ‘In one bloody awful hole,’ replied the East Londonderry MP with customary candour.⁴ From the other side of the divide, the SDLP – which would be critical to the success of any such venture – was scathing. Thus, Mark Durkan mocked the illogicality of Trimble’s willingness to engage with Sinn Fein in an assembly but refusal to hold all-party talks without decommissioning.⁵ Many felt that the reason for SDLP hostility to the Trimble plan was that the party feared it would do badly in any contest with Sinn Fein, which had been legitimated by the ‘peace process’ and which was a much younger and more dynamic party. Significantly, though, the plan was not dismissed out of hand by the Taoiseach, John Bruton.⁶ The emerging relationship between Trimble and the Irish state would be critical to the UUP leader’s willingness to engage in the talks and ultimately to sign the Belfast Agreement. It was to be a tortuous and sometimes tempestuous process – on both sides – and its beginnings were inauspicious. Fergus Finlay, Dick Spring’s adviser, recalls that when Trimble was elected leader, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin (known as ‘DFA’) feared that the relationships forged with liberal Unionists in the early 1990s – with figures such as Ken Maginnis and the McGimpsey brothers – counted for nothing. It was assumed that those whom the Irish knew best would now be marginalised. Moreover, states Finlay, ‘he was a total stranger to us. All we knew was stuff we didn’t like, which everyone knew, like Drumcree. But no one had ever had lunch with him, or really encountered him on a prolonged basis.’⁷ Finlay was not entirely correct: Sean O hUiginn, the head of the Anglo-Irish Affairs division at the DFA had first met Trimble almost 20 years before in the post-Vanguard period. O hUiginn had huge reservations about the conduct of Trimble at Drumcree, but also found in his election intriguing parallels with the rise of Daniel O’Connell, the leading campaigner for Catholic emancipation of the early 19th century. O hUiginn noticed that as with O’Connell, Unionists laid huge stress on how ‘articulate’ Trimble was: the classic response of a grouping which feels itself to be voiceless (the analogy held up in another way, too, since both men could be very splenetic!).⁸

Trimble still saw the Republic as a political, if not a cultural enemy.⁹In the early 1970s, he thought that ‘the Republic was very close to waging proxy war against us. The role of the Irish Government in creating the Provisional IRA was the turning of blind eyes. Things changed under [the government of Liam] Cosgrave in 1974–5 and as far as the Irish public was concerned. Northern Ireland had gone off the boil and they were anxious to have things settled. The Irish state was then wholly sectarian. Changes had started with Vatican II but they were taking a long time to work their way through Irish society. Only in the last decade – partly under the influence of the divorce referendum, and the exposure of the paedophile priests – has social life ceased to be controlled by the [Catholic] Church. And then, of course, there was the embattled, declining southern Protestant community. I remember attending one Apprentice Boys of Derry function in the late 1980s at Raphoe, Co. Donegal, and them telling me “don’t end up in the same hole as us”.’¹⁰ Subsequently, though, in his UUP annual conference speech at Portrush, Co. Antrim, on 21 October 1995, Trimble approvingly quoted John Whyte as stating that the Republic was not merely a poorer society, but also a more unequal one on account of its retrograde housing and education policies.¹¹ In fact, much of Trimble’s analysis of the southern economy and society was already out of date. He tended to underrate the rise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ as a source of self-confidence to nationalists on both sides of the border, making the price which they would ask for any deal all the higher.

Such was the baggage which Trimble carried on his first visit to Dublin as leader of the UUP. There was still a degree of reticence on the Unionist side about accepting this kind of invitation. Molyneaux had gone to Dublin Castle in 1992 as part of the Strand II segment of multilateral talks, but had not gone to bilaterals with the Irish at Government Buildings, where the Taoiseach’s office is located. Indeed, not since Terence O’Neill’s meetings with the then Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, at the Mansion House in 1965, and with his successor, Jack Lynch, at Iveagh House in January 1968, had a UUP chief gone south for this sort of exchange. Again, Trimble’s purpose in so doing was to kill such taboos once and for all.¹² He wanted to do so at this particular point when he was under relatively little pressure, rather than be forced to abandon this stance under duress during a crisis in the talks. But Trimble also wanted to make another point. He wanted to be seen to be meeting first with the Taoiseach rather than Dick Spring, whose department had day-to-day responsibility for Northern Ireland. Such a meeting also contained the implicit message that Trimble was the potential Prime Minister-in-waiting of Northern Ireland, the two men dealing as equals.

After breakfasting at John Taylor’s house near Armagh, the Unionist team crossed the border. Their first task was to launch a book at the Mansion House written by two Unionist policy analysts, Esmond Birnie and Paddy Roche, entitled An Economics Lessson for Irish Nationalists and Republicans, which charged that a united Ireland made no economic sense and that the Republic in any case could not afford reintegration of the national territory. Under the gaze of Daniel O’Connell – whose portrait hangs in the Mansion House – Trimble signed the visitors’ book and wrote his address as ‘Lisburn, Co. Antrim, UK’. At the reception, afterwards, which was attended by de Rossa and the new leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, Trimble signed copies of the book. The reception had another significance in the longer run. For it was at this event that Trimble first met Eoghan Harris, the Sunday Times columnist, former Workers’ Party political strategist, and scriptwriter for the television series Sharpe. Harris describes himself as ‘a sort of Andrew Neil without the charm, a sort of Peter Mandelson without a party’, and had guided both de Rossa and Mary Robinson to their respective triumphs in the European election of 1989 and the presidential election of 1990.¹³ Harris was spotted in close conversation with the UUP leader, causing one journalist to remark, ‘he’s probably looking for an advice contract. They must be the only political party who he hasn’t advised.’ ‘Who said he hasn’t?’ responded another. The reporter’s hunch was prophetic.¹⁴

The encounter with Bruton was in and of itself relatively unmemorable. Trimble stated his belief that all-party talks could not possibly begin by the end of 1995 because of Sinn Fein/IRA’s intransigent stance on the weapons issue. Bruton found Trimble to be not particularly au fait with the nuances of southern politics, but he noted that the UUP leader was prepared to take the chance of finding out more.¹⁵ A new channel of communication was established and regular meetings would be held in future. The media reaction was mostly positive: The Times of London speculated that Gerry Adams had met his match.¹⁶ Mary Holland of the Irish Times was impressed by Trimble’s boldness and reckoned that because of Drumcree he now had a stock of political capital to persuade his own community that the structures of government in Northern Ireland would never again be based upon majoritarian principles.¹⁷

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).

Hilda Mac Thomas was not the only republican with a nuanced view of Trimble’s election. Andrew Hunter met with Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Fein at the Clonard Monastery in west Belfast in December 1995. According to Hunter’s extensive notes of the discussion – and he told McLaughlin he would be reporting back to the British Government – the Sinn Fein chairman described Trimble as ‘a formidable politician, not to be underestimated … McCartney will eventually succeed Paisley as leader of Unionist hardliners. Trimble is on his guard against this: hence the populist stand which Trimble sometimes adopts.’ McLaughlin expressed grave reservations about Trimble’s idea of an elective route to negotiations, but he did not rule it out: he opined that one reason why Trimble wanted elections was to demonstrate how derisory was the support for the UDP and PUP, the parties representing the UDA and the UVF. This, McLaughlin said, would destroy the credibility of Gary McMichael, David Ervine and other loyalist politicians whose participation exasperated mainstream Unionists.

Over the longer term, McLaughlin was confident that republicans would obtain what they wanted, which was nothing less than the Frameworks Documents. This was because in his view, ‘ordinary Unionist people and the Unionist business community are far more realistic’ (this was also the NIO line of the post-ceasefire period). Whilst preferring not to have a Northern assembly under its Strand I proposals – on the ground that it would confer some legitimacy upon the six counties – McLaughlin said that Sinn Fein would accept it in the context of a ‘transitional process’ if there were sufficient checks and balances to prevent a return to majoritarian Unionist domination. If satisfied on this point, Sinn Fein might tolerate an assembly for a short while as a tactical concession. When Hunter asked him why unionists should cooperate in creating a united Ireland, McLaughlin replied: ‘We accept there must be a transitional process but it will be an interim phase on the way to a united Ireland. It will enable unionists to adjust to change. They will grow to accept a united Ireland.’ Later, the tone became harsher still. McLaughlin told Hunter that ‘the British are spoiling for a fight. If they want one, they can have it.’ (McLaughlin’s office states this was said in a purely political sense.) But the IRA was already preparing its devastating response to the ‘log-jam’ in the ‘peace process’. Hunter suspected that all was not well. Likewise, Trimble was alarmed by the increasing numbers of punishment beatings and terrorist training and targeting. Thus, at their first meeting after he became UUP leader, on 14 September 1995, when John Hume told him that he felt that the IRA would not go back to violence, Trimble viewed the claim with much scepticism.³⁰ His fears would soon be terribly vindicated.