Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 19

IF David Trimble stands for anything as leader of his party, it is for the modernisation of Ulster Unionism. This is not simply a question, as he often likes to say, of making Unionists ‘think politically rather than simply presenting a hard face to the world’. It is also a question of overhauling party organisation and of bringing on energetic young cadres who would become the Unionist First XI of the future. Many thought that this was largely a matter of breaking or reforming the party’s traditional links with the Orange Order, but it was more ambitious in scope than that. It took up much of his time in his early months as leader; Conor Cruise O’Brien paid his first visit ever to Glengall Street shortly after Trimble’s election and was struck by how absorbed the new leader was in internal party management and with establishing his credentials within the broader Unionist family.¹ Fergus Finlay derived the same impression and concluded that such imperatives would preclude rapid progress in the ‘peace process’.²

The party which David Trimble took over from Jim Molyneaux was antiquated in its culture and structure. Thus, until the mid-1990s, claims Jim Wilson (the chief executive of the UUP from 1987 to 1998) the party would send out press releases in black taxis to just five obvious outlets, such as the News Letter. Then there was the matter of the party’s federated structure. Its organisation resembled that of the Tories prior to William Hague’s reforms of 1997–8. There was, however, one crucial difference with the Conservatives: whereas the power of Tory associations via the old National Union and Central Council was more apparent than real, the analogous UUP structures were invested with genuine democratic significance. The party was a collection of highly independent local associations and affiliated bodies which came together in something called the Ulster Unionist Council. This met annually, usually in March, to elect the officers and the leader. Crucially, a mere 60 signatures was required to trigger a meeting of the UUC, a rule which was to bedevil Trimble’s life in the coming years. The 860-member UUC delegated to the leader and the officers collectively the task of employing the staff of the headquarters organisation. The officers, in turn, were also subject to the scrutiny of the 120-strong party executive, whose job was to make policy in consultation with the leader. Because of local autonomy, there was no common membership list throughout the Province and Glengall Street thus had little idea of the party’s total strength. Indeed, in many places the lists were held in exercise books and people would be deemed to be members of the UUP if they donated an apple pie to a Halloween fundraiser.³ And then there was the vexed issue of the UUP’s links with the Orange Order: as well as the obvious individual party members who happened to be Orangemen, the Orange Institution as a whole sent around 120 delegates to the UUC. Those delegates could be appointed by people who were not necessarily members of the UUP; indeed, as Jack Allen observes, as much as two-thirds of the members of some County Lodges could be supporters of the DUP.⁴

Concern about the UUP’s organisational obsolescence predated Trimble’s election as leader, but little came of it. There was always something else on the agenda in terms of the peace process, and the important invariably yielded pride of place to the urgent. The group of dynamic young hardliners who had pushed Trimble for the leadership were, however, determined to change things. But it is hard to know, even in this area, what Trimble really wanted to do, as opposed to any casual talk of radical reform in which he may have indulged others before 1995. Prior to his victory, says John Hunter, Trimble always wanted a ‘clean-out’ of Glengall Street and that he spoke derisively of its ‘good ole’ boy’ culture.⁵ The ‘Young Turks’ appear to have been operating on the asssumption that they were ridding the sovereign of his ‘turbulent priests’. Denis Rogan, then UUP vice chairman recalls that ‘either they were promised or in the campaign thought there would be a gutting of Glengall Street – a whole series of young advisers brought in to drive a new policy’.⁶

A counter-offensive was soon launched by the old guard. James Cooper spoke for many senior party stalwarts – few of whom declared for Trimble in the leadership race – when he opined that Trimble had been elected with too narrow a base from the right wing of the Orange Order (at this point, says Cooper, there were also doubts about Trimble’s stability and his willingness to stay the course).⁷ But Trimble was for now the leader and they would have to work with him. The question was on whose terms? The Young Turks’ or the party establishment’s? Jim Nicholson’s recollection of the first officers’ meeting was that ‘it was fairly difficult and edgy. A lot of officers didn’t trust what David Trimble would do – an attempt to do a clean sweep of party people who did great service.’⁸ Jeffrey Donaldson, an honorary secretary of the party, says that at this first meeting, Trimble was told in no uncertain terms that he was not to conduct any widespread purges.⁹ Jack Allen recalls that ‘Jim Nicholson would muse that times were changing and that there was now a new regime but it soon became clear that things would go on as before. I told Jim Wilson “David Trimble can’t sack you.” The leader doesn’t really have that power, though he can influence things.’¹⁰ Allen’s last remark accords with Trimble’s own analysis. Trimble says that he was gravely embarrassed by Hunter’s claims of imminent purges, ‘none of which I could have done if I’d wanted to’. He notes that Ulster Unionist leaders are in a very weak position vis-à-vis the party organisation compared to Paisley’s DUP (which, Trimble believes, operates on a top-down basis, rather than a bottom-up basis). The leader has no capacity to hire and fire the chief executive, which is in the hands of the officers and UUP Executive collectively, of whom the leader is just one. But obviously a leader could, if he was so minded, recommend it.¹¹

But why did Trimble not seek to move his colleagues in a more radical direction through persuasion and influence? Partly, because he can be disorganised and often cannot see things through to their conclusion: in that sense, his déformation professionelle is as much that of the chaotic, overburdened university lecturer as it is the hyper-legalism of the academic lawyer. There is also a sense in which he is like a butterfly: he often cannot stick to an objective and rapidly moves on to the next, more interesting topic. (Jack Allen recalls that in his frenetic early days as leader, he would not delegate to anyone, to the point of insisting on doing the photocopying himself. In this sense, he was rather like Molyneaux.)¹² But it is also the case that party reform was less than radical because the UUP establishment grew accustomed to his face – and he grew comfortable with them. Moreover, as he lost his original base of ‘Young Turks’ because of his compromises with the British Government and with Irish nationalism, he increasingly needed the old guard to push through his policy on the peace process. A complete overhaul of the UUP party risked stirring up a hornets’ nest of vested interests, which could imperil his immediate policy objectives. Indeed, Trimble was to discover that he could construct a kind of ‘New Unionism’ with ‘Old Unionists’.

But one seemingly minor change in the way that party business was conducted turned out to Trimble’s great long-term advantage: shortly after he became chairman in early 1996, Denis Rogan increased the numbers of party executive meetings from four to six per annum, including two on Saturdays. The purpose was to ensure that the party was more thoroughly involved in the decision-making process, a concept which Trimble heartily endorsed.¹³ As a result, crucial moments in the ‘peace process’ were punctuated by these meetings, which ratified their leader’s decisions. Would he surmount the extra hurdles at each stage of the emerging deal? It could have turned into a disaster for Trimble, but in fact he turned them to his advantage. First of all, by giving at least the appearance of openness, he sought to scotch the notion that secret deals were being cooked up at No. 10 or elsewhere between the UUP leader and the two Governments. Second, by giving Trimble a chance to speak more often, it played to his strength – mastery of complexities of the talks process, allowing him to ‘blind them with science’. Third, by having to account to this increased number of meetings, which could have rejected his policies, Trimble was able to create a sense of crisis. He thus used his weakness to give himself extra bargaining leverage with the Governments, because he had to give the UUP Executive something when they met.

But such innovation was a rare exception. In practice, Trimble has proven reluctant to pay much of a price to achieve party reform. This tendency was illustrated by his reaction to the debate on the link with the Orange Order, at his first party conference as leader. Trimble had never wanted to break the connection entirely, but he did want it substantially modified.¹⁴ Partly, he was motivated by a wish to see the UUP as a voice of new, civic unionism which would attract Catholic members put off by its sectarian tinge. But he also knew that even if such change was accomplished, there would be comparatively few gains amongst the Catholic population. Rather, his real motive was to make the UUP attractive once again to middle-class Protestants who found the connection to the Loyal Orders an embarrassment. Trimble felt that Unionism could ill afford the Protestant middle classes’ continuing opt-out from politics – to which he was such a marked exception. At the party conference at Portrush, Co. Antrim in October 1995, he pitched not only for a common membership but also for reform of the delegate structure. Henceforth, the UUC and the Executive would be composed only of association and branch representatives. In other words, no one would sit on them as representatives of the Orange Order per se. Of course, individual Orangemen would still sit on the ruling councils of the party as constituency representatives, and he hoped that this innovation would actually stimulate more of them to participate: many supposed that if the Loyal Orders were formally represented then they need do nothing themselves.¹⁵ But despite the standing ovation which he received for his address, and notwithstanding what the Orange Standard called his almost Harold McCusker-like ‘cult figure’ status amongst the brethren in north Armagh, reforming the link with the Orange Order proved harder to effect in practice.¹⁶ Partly, he did not succeed because of the unexpected. During the debate at Portrush, Drew Nelson pronounced that ‘in a sense this party was a child of the Orange Order, but the child has now grown up’: much heckling and booing ensued.¹⁷ Trimble believes that Nelson’s undiplomatic sally polarised debate and caused it to go off the rails. The officers then had to calm things down and they opted for a compromise resolution calling for a top-level review.¹⁸ It was passed by a two to one margin, but little change has been effected since.¹⁹ Many compared this task to Tony Blair’s recasting of his party’s relations with the trade unions. In truth, Trimble failed not because of Drew Nelson’s candour but because he had not done the necessary preparatory work; for all his admiration of New Labour, he lacked the Blairite zeal and organisational ruthlessness to push such changes through. Later, this would greatly irritate Irish nationalists, who believed that a failure to purge such elements made for perpetual crises in Unionism and condemned Trimble to endless narrow margins within the UUC.

Similar ineptitude characterised Trimble’s dealings with the parliamentary party. Shortly after the election, a very senior UUP source told Frank Millar that ‘we have five MPs who I wish would just go, announce that they intend to stand down at the next election’. The five named were Ross, Smyth, Cecil Walker (North Belfast), Roy Beggs (East Antrim) and Clifford Forsythe (South Antrim).²⁰ Trimble says that he knew he had a generational problem: indeed, in early 1996, the Belfast Telegraph noted that the combined age of the nine UUP MPs was 560 years, or an average of 62.2 (with Trimble as the youngest at 51). Whilst most Ulster parties tend to be older on average than their mainland counterparts, the UUP’s record was then the most gerontophile. Some of the Young Turks were pushing for deselections, notably the Oxford-educated North Belfast councillor, Nelson McCausland, who had targeted Walker. Trimble says that he did nothing to dissuade McCausland, but nor did he help him either (Trimble would later change his view of Walker dramatically for the better).²¹ David Brewster, then Treasurer of the East Londonderry Association, says that Trimble’s backing helped him to win one of the party’s four honorary secretaryships at the 1996 AGM of the UUC. Brewster thinks that Trimble had a reason for this: he told the younger man that if he wanted his support to take over from Ross, he would have it. Brewster had no interest in making such a challenge against Ross, and would subsequently become a leading critic of Trimble in the Union First Group after the signing of the Belfast Agreement and in December 2003 joined the DUP.²² McCausland’s challenge in North Belfast fizzled out, partly because of the endemic factionalism in that association, which as Brewster observes, ‘makes Kosovo look simple by comparison’.²³

Trimble also appeared to flirt with the idea of recreating a pan-unionist front – an idea which resurfaces every time that loyalists feel under threat. The idea was that Unionists would opt out of the process ad interim, build up their strength, modernise their structures, and then return to the table stronger and better equipped to repel the advances of their enemies. After Drumcree I, the conditions for such a recoalescence of pro-British forces appeared more auspicious than they had for some time. Certainly, Paisley welcomed Trimble’s election as leader and ascribed his success to his identification with a stance closer to that of the DUP. Within ten days of his election, Trimble had met with Paisley at the latter’s home in Cyprus Avenue (a street made famous in the Van Morrison song on the album Astral Weeks).The two men expressed their unity of purpose on the Union and the Frameworks Documents, but made little further progress.²⁴ But this démarche failed – largely because the UUP feared it would end up co-opted into a Paisleyite front in which it would become the junior partner. The other significant Unionist party leader, Robert McCartney of the UKUP, was soon to develop doubts about Trimble as well. Initially, McCartney had also welcomed Trimble’s election as leader, judging him to be the candidate most willing to work with the leaders of the other Unionist parties.²⁵ A week after the election, Trimble contacted McCartney, who duly invited Trimble to his home, where the two men discussed the future of Unionism. As Trimble was leaving, McCartney said to him: ‘David, you are now leader of the largest Unionist party and as such you will not want for advice. There are people in London, Dublin and Washington who will take you to the top of the temple and they will say, “all of this can be yours if you do what you are told”.’ According to McCartney, Trimble simply nodded, smiled and left.²⁶

Washington was not so sure whether Trimble was quite so biddable as McCartney feared. Nancy Soderberg says that the US administration knew little about Trimble, apart from what had been observed on the television screens at Drumcree earlier in the year.²⁷ But for all their doubts, the Clinton administration had to make the effort to see whether the new UUP leader would become ‘engaged’.²⁸ Trimble did so with gusto. For unlike so many of the older generation of Unionist politicians, Trimble carried no anti-American baggage, either culturally or politically – although he disliked the activities of many Irish-Americans and of Nancy Soderberg in particular. Prior to serving as senior staff director for European affairs on the President’s National Security Council with specific responsibility for Ireland, Soderberg worked for Senator Edward Kennedy. For this, and above all for her role in helping Gerry Adams obtain a visa over British Government objections in 1994, she became a hate figure amongst Unionists, earning the soubriquet of ‘Nancy Sodabread’. Moreover, she forged a close working relationship with Jean Kennedy Smith, the American ambassador in Dublin and a sister of Senator Kennedy, who had out-gunned her counterpart in London, Raymond Seitz, over the Adams visa. But Soderberg and her colleagues also understood that it took ‘two sides to tango’. Having ‘engaged’ with Adams, they would now have to work much harder with Unionists to convince them that they, too, had a stake of sorts in the ‘process’ and that the United States was not utterly hostile to the interests of the Ulster-British population. They were keen to emphasise their desire to promote a peaceful settlement and did not care that much about the precise terms of the deal. As Nancy Soderberg observes, ‘the truth is we were knocking on the unionist door for some time and Trimble was the first one to answer’.²⁹

Trimble was indeed the first Ulster Unionist leader of recent times to answer the call on a sustained basis, but the links went further back than Soderberg’s remarks suggested. Terence O’Neill as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland sought to make much of Ulster-Scots heritage in his dealings with both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and his Christmas card of December 1964 showed him meeting with LBJ at the White House: on St Patrick’s Day of that year, O’Neill had presented the Commander-in-Chief with a book on the Scotch-Irish and banqueting cloths (which delighted the Linen Guild back at home).³⁰ Charles Reynolds, an Ulsterman living in America, also organised information campaigns on behalf of the pro-Union population following the outbreak of the Troubles, the highlight of which was a highly effective tour by Brian Faulkner in June and July of 1972.³¹ And efforts were made at various points in the 1980s by David Burnside, Frank Millar and Harold McCusker. Likewise, Peter Robinson, Gregory Campbell and others undertook activities on behalf of the DUP.³² However, during the long tenure of James Molyneaux, such activities were not given a notably high priority by the UUP. Towards the very end of Molyneaux’s long tenure in office, arrangements were put in place for a UUP North American bureau with offices donated by Tony Culley-Foster, a Washington businessman who grew up in Londonderry. One of his employees, the Scottish-born Anne Smith of McLean, Virginia, was seconded to work for it, officially for one day a week.³³

Nancy Soderberg acknowledges that the UUP North American bureau did provide some kind of reference point which had not previously existed, and other Administration officials have been courteous enough about Smith’s contribution.³⁴ Nonetheless, Smith was neither from Northern Ireland nor could she be described as a ‘heavy-hitting’ Washington lobbyist type who ‘packed a punch inside the Beltway’. Trimble stuck doggedly by her and refused to entertain any suggestions to have Smith removed. Moreover, this outfit had nothing like the resources of Sinn Fein’s North American organisation. It has remained determinedly low-key in the years since then: David Burnside says that he had secured a pledge of $250,000–$300,000 for a full-time professional lobbyist, but the offer was rejected.³⁵ According to Trimble, Burnside offered a lobbying firm to raise money. But the idea was partly rejected by the UUP officer team on the grounds that it would be embarrassing if the North American office spent more money per annum than Glengall Street. More important, says Trimble, was the point that the money could have come from conservative American sources who wanted it to be used for partisan, anti-Clinton purposes. This was something he was not prepared to countenance, despite the fact that the US Administration was close to a low ebb at this point following the Republicans’ takeover of Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections.³⁶

Trimble’s election also coincided with a change in key personnel amongst British and American officialdom in 1995, notably the appointment of Sir John Kerr as British ambassador to Washington, and that of Blair Hall as Political Counsellor at the US Embassy in London. Both men earned Trimble’s admiration and trust, in a way that Soderberg never did: she realised that Unionists had to be brought in, but carried so much baggage by this point that she was unable to do it herself. Kerr and Hall were thus crucial to the task of facilitating the Unionists’ admission into the international mainstream. Kerr was a Glaswegian Protestant married to a Catholic of Irish descent: Trimble certainly felt that as a native of the west of Scotland, he had a greater instinctive feel for the problems of Ulster than a more conventional ‘Oxbridge type’. Kerr arrived in Washington on the heels of Sir Robin Renwick’s devastating rebuff over the Adams visa. The British Embassy was enormously defensive towards Capitol Hill and the media. Kerr determined to reverse this through a variety of measures. In March 1996, Kerr broke with tradition by hosting his own St Patrick’s Day party in the Lutyens embassy residence; Dermot Gallagher, the then Irish ambassador retorted that he would throw a St George’s Day drinks party to even the score. But there was a serious message behind Kerr’s move. Its essence was that Irishness was not the sole preserve of Irish nationalists or of the Irish state.³⁷

America need not necessarily have been stony ground for Unionism. As a News Letter editorial of 9 November 1995, ‘Selling Ulster’, put it: ‘the Unionist message has never been fully explained on the other side of the Atlantic and this has undoubtedly been to the detriment of a majority population who enjoy a kin relationship with up to 25 million of US citizens, descended from the quarter of a million Ulster-Scots Presbyterians who emigrated to the American frontier 200/250 years ago. Of the 40 million Americans who would claim to have Irish blood in their veins, an estimated 56 per cent come of Ulster Protestant stock. Whilst the knowledge of the political nuances in Northern Ireland may be extremely limited, this section would be broadly susceptible to the unionist argument and the importance of effectively dealing with terrorism conducted by a tiny unrepresentative group of people.’ Trimble wholeheartedly agreed with these sentiments. Indeed, according to the American website Political Graveyard, no fewer than seven Trimbles have been elected to the US Senate and Congress since the inception of the Republic – mostly from Kentucky and from neighbouring Ohio (the most recently elected Trimble had, ironically, served in the US House of Representatives as a Democrat from Arkansas from 1945 to 1967). There was even a Trimble County in Kentucky, named for Robert Trimble, who became an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court and an intimate of the great John Marshall, Chief Justice. His forebears had orginally come from Co. Armagh in the 1740s. And General Isaac Trimble of Virginia – a descendant of a Trimble who emigrated from Co. Antrim in the early 18th century – had led two brigades of Pender’s division during Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was captured by Union forces after the lower third of his leg was amputated near the battlefield.³⁸

This was the heritage which, in British eyes, lent Trimble such significance in America. For a long time, the US Administration had been influenced by the notion that the Unionists were mere puppets of the British and of the Tories in particular. This idea had been assiduously fostered by Sinn Fein via Irish Americans. Patrick Mayhew, with his patrician manner, was not the best man to correct this impression with American audiences and his visits became more infrequent. Trimble’s manner was obviously not patrician. His accent alone was proof that there were intelligent and reasonable residents of the geographic entity of the island of Ireland who wished for no part in an all-Ireland state. Moreover, the British Government understood that the Unionist population were fed up with the ceaseless reminders of Adams’ film-star status in America. If it continued unchecked, they could easily conclude that the ‘peace process’ was irremediably stacked against them. They would then become even less willing to cut some deal with Irish nationalism. The British also understood very well that many Unionists have always had a craving for respectability, perhaps more than some of their critics and admirers have supposed. This included the UUP leader. ‘Trimble went to America a huge amount,’ recalls Sir John Wheeler. ‘It played to his ego. He loved his Washington jaunts and was made much of. Suddenly, here was the man from Vanguard who walked with kings and princes.’³⁹

William Crowe, the American ambassador in London, and Blair Hall, the Political Counsellor at the embassy, also recognised that a one-sided process would be inherently unstable. But initially, it looked as if these overtures might go disastrously wrong. Anthony Lake, the National Security Adviser, came to London in October 1995 and met Trimble in the sunlit corner room of the US ambassador’s residence in Winfield House, overlooking Regent’s Park. There was an exchange of pleasantries which well matched the Gainsborough pictures and the flowered armchairs. It all passed smoothly until Lake urged Trimble to ‘exert leadership’ over prior decommissioning and ventured that his community would understand. ‘Don’t tell me what my community thinks!’ exploded Trimble. Lake appeared shocked, and it confirmed the Americans’ fears of Trimble’s volatility (Lake and Soderberg also expressed scepticism about Trimble’s elective assembly).⁴⁰ It is possible that Trimble wanted to show that he was no pushover, and that he chose deliberately to foster what Richard Nixon called the ‘madman theory’: that he needed to be handled with great care lest he go off the rails. Trimble denies this to be the case, though he is calculating enough in other ways.⁴¹ It may be that he behaved thus out of genuine annoyance at a foolish suggestion which showed no comprehension of the balance of forces within Unionism.

The British were determined to persist with the UUP’s ‘outreach’: Trimble recalls that John Major had told him that if he pressed for a meeting with the President, the request would be favourably received. It was accordingly arranged that the President would make a ‘drop-by’, ‘spontaneous’ meeting whilst Trimble was in Vice President Al Gore’s suite. This was the form employed when the President did not yet want to bestow a full Oval Office tête-à-tête, but from a Unionist perspective it was a significant step to parity of treatment with John Hume.⁴² Sir John Kerr says that there was huge interest in Trimble when he came to town. Attention particularly focused upon internal relations within the UUP, notably between Trimble and Taylor. Nobody, says Kerr, had studied Trimble in advance and they did not know what to make of him (such uncertainty did not affect the hardline republican Irish American Unity Conference, which took out an advert in the New York Times on 30 October 1995 entitled ‘A WELCOME TO DAVID TRIMBLE, THE “DAVID DUKE” OF IRELAND’ and likening the Orange Order to the KKK. The next day, David Duke expressed anger that his name had been blackened by such unfavourable comparisons!). Following a breakfast meeting with Edward Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts singled Trimble out as the most important political leader in the Province and said that ‘all of us here in Congress know that Mr Trimble is going to play a vital role in settling the future of Northern Ireland. Whatever is worked out will be worked out for the future of Northern Ireland by the people of Northern Ireland.’⁴³ This belied the rancorous nature of Trimble’s meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs, including Congressman Peter King, a Long Island Republican and an energetic supporter of Sinn Fein. All relentlessly peppered him with hostile questions, and Trimble responded in kind. At the White House, Trimble met with Gore for half an hour and they were joined by Clinton for ten minutes.⁴⁴ Trimble again pressed his idea of an elected assembly, but little of substance was achieved. One thing would impress him above all others: he presented Clinton with copies of two Ulster Society publications: Ronnie Hanna’s book on American servicemen in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, Pardon Me Boy and Gordon Lucy’s lively study of the Ulster Covenant – which he brought into the White House in a grotty plastic bag. When the President made his first visit to Belfast some weeks later, he had read both from cover to cover, and was able to put the British Prime Minister right on points of fact. The White House noticed one other thing about Trimble during these early visits: according to Anthony Lake, the UUP leader would glance across to John Taylor to see his deputy’s reactions.⁴⁵

In truth, Trimble made a mixed impression on those he met. He seemed to many of his interlocutors to be very prickly, and very much on the look-out for insults and slights. Partly, it was inexperience: he handled the US media in a confrontational manner more appropriate to a rowdy Unionist gathering back at home. But, says Anne Smith, it was also because many of his interlocutors were either hostile – as was the case with the Ad Hoc Committee – or else uninformed. As she observes, the most common question which Trimble had for years to endure on his visits to America was ‘why won’t you shake hands with Gerry Adams?’ They always, says Smith, wanted Trimble to make the first move, because that is the way that reasonable men settle their disputes in the United States. It would take some years for Americans to understand the reasons for Trimble’s reluctance – namely, the reaction of ordinary Unionists to the idea of such a meeting.⁴⁶ That was because such understanding of the Unionist case as was achieved was entirely functional: no Unionists, no process. But there was no year-round constituency created with a positive understanding of the merits of Unionism. There was, eight years later, no pro-Unionist bloc to counteract the influence of the Irish-American lobby.

In some ways this was understandable. After all, when it came to the affairs of Ireland, the Scotch-Irish Protestant immigrants of the 17th and 18th centuries were more thoroughly assimilated than the Gaelic Catholic Irish of the 19th and 20th centuries. That said, many small peripheral peoples without limitless resources such as the Chechens had set up Washington offices on a shoestring basis and had successfully mobilised far more support for their cause. Indeed, in the 1980s, even a figure such as the military dictator of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt (who was pushing a rather worse case than the Unionists of Ulster) had managed to garner some support amongst his fellow evangelicals in the United States for his regime. Why then did the UUP not succeed in making in-roads? Anne Smith states there was simply no time to cultivate the ‘Bible Belt’, partly because of what she claims to be the size and fragmentation of the community.⁴⁷ But Unionists did little better with secular conservatives ‘inside the Beltway’. Despite widespread conservative disgust with the Clinton administration, Unionists were unable to cash in much on his granting of a visa to Gerry Adams at the behest of that great right-wing bête noire, Edward Kennedy. Indeed, Sinn Fein/IRA was allied to many bitterly anti-American ‘national liberation movements’ such as the PLO: the historic hostility of Irish republicans to US foreign policy objectives throughout much of the world remained one of their best-kept secrets until 2001. Nor was the UUP leader aware of the existence of the extended Trimble clan in Kentucky and Ohio, despite his own historical enthusiasms. Trimble himself recognised that the UUP ought to do more, but was too busy and too disorganised to do anything about them. There was, however, another aspect to his failure to deliver. Did Trimble really want to build up a network of support amongst Congressmen from the Deep South, who might act as a counterweight to the Kennedys et al.? When the idea of such an ‘outreach’ operation in America was broached to him at the October 2000 Conservative party conference in Bournemouth, he said, ‘No, I can’t be associated with yahoos.’⁴⁸ Certainly, he never reached out on a regular basis to such natural allies as Senator Jesse Helms, who held the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee throughout that period, and who loathed the Provisionals. Partly, this was because Trimble had gradually became acutely self-aware of his status as a pillar of the international ‘civilised’ order. And because he is naturally shy, he liked to engage only with a few people in the United States, or anywhere else: what mattered to him above all else were his dealings with Clinton. It was a pattern which would eventually be replicated in his dealings with Clinton’s admirer – Tony Blair.