Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism. Dean Godson

and they would return to office, but not on the basis of traditional majority rule. Instead, it would be in an enforced cross-community coalition with some of their harsh critics in the SDLP. For nationalists, it was the all-Ireland aspects of the deal which were most important: the gradual transfer of powers to the Council of Ireland was seen by them as possessing the potential, over time, to take Ulster peacefully out of the United Kingdom and into a united Ireland of some kind. After all, they argued, they would be acquiescing in the return of Unionists to the hated Stormont, where nationalists would still be in the minority; and they acknowledged more explicitly than before that Ireland could be re-unified only with the consent of Ulster’s majority. Therefore, in order to keep their constituency happy, the SDLP and the Irish Government felt that they had to obtain a ‘result’ on the Council of Ireland.³ Heath duly summoned the leaders of the power-sharing parties – Faulkner Unionists, Alliance and the SDLP as well as the Irish government – for a conference at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in Berkshire to draw these strands together. The deal struck there contained many of the elements found in the Belfast Agreement of 1998: hence the famous bon mot of Seamus Mallon, now Deputy First Minister, that any subsequent settlement would be ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.⁴ By this, Mallon meant that the broad outlines for any new arrangements in Northern Ireland were always going to be the same, whether in 1973–4 or in 1998–9. According to this analysis, the hardliners on both sides were too obstinate or confident of securing an unattainable ethnic victory over the other to perceive this essential reality.

      But others have invested the phrase with a meaning beyond that given to it by Mallon. Mallon may have implied that David Trimble – a trenchant critic of Sunningdale – was one of the ‘slow learners’. But to pro-Agreement Unionists, it was the two Governments who were themselves slow learners. From a moderate Unionist standpoint, the Governments had asked Faulkner, the leader of the largest party representing the majority community, to bear too much of a political burden: indeed, the then Irish Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald, with John Hume, pushed for a more ambitious version of the Council of Ireland.⁵ Faulkner called these cross-border arrangements – which, initially at least, comprised tourism and animal health – as ‘necessary nonsense’ that would keep nationalists happy within essentially partitionist structures. But most Unionists perceived them to be an embryonic government for the whole island. Unionists (and, above all, David Trimble) derived the lesson that it was these all-Ireland aspects of the deal – rather than power-sharing with nationalists – which were unacceptable to the mass of Unionists. That is why in the week of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 – when the very ‘Green’ draft settlement was rejected by Unionists – Lord Alderdice of the Alliance party brought a predecessor who served in the Sunningdale Executive, Sir Oliver Napier, to meet Tony Blair. His purpose was to explain to the Prime Minister that Trimble would end up as another Faulkner if the draft agreement was rammed down his throat.⁶ The ghost of Faulkner thus hangs over much of what Trimble does: indeed, both men rose to the leadership on account of their strong Orange credentials, in Trimble’s case because of Drumcree, in Faulkner’s because he led a disputed Orange march down the Longstone Road in Annalong, Co. Down, in 1955.⁷

      Curiously, Trimble recalls that he felt a degree of sympathy with Faulkner’s dilemma even at the time. David Bleakley, who was the Northern Ireland Labour party’s representative in the 1975–6 Convention, remembers being struck by the fact that Trimble was one of the very few rejectionists in that body who did not lash into the deposed Faulkner.⁸ Nonetheless, like everyone in Vanguard, Trimble found the overall Sunningdale package unacceptable. The prospects of derailing it, however, seemed at first slender. Shouting abuse at the Faulknerites in the Assembly had not proved noticeably successful. When Trimble heard of the idea of an all-out strike to protest against the new dispensation, he doubted whether it would work, for he recalled the ignominious failure of the earlier protests. In a peculiar way, this was to be a key card in the hands of the loyalist resistance. There had been so many abortive acts of defiance that when the strikes became really serious in May 1974, it came as a surprise to much of the government machine. As ever Vanguard, with its extraordinary mix of town and gown, took the lead in coordinating the resistance of a variety of loyalist organisations to the emerging settlement. Craig brought Trimble to the Portrush conference in December 1973, which was the precursor to the formation of the United Ulster Unionist Council. The UUUC (or ‘Treble UC’ as it came to be known) was to become the umbrella group for all of those Unionists – Vanguard, DUP and anti-Faulkner Ulster Unionists – opposed to the ‘historic compromise’ with nationalism. The aim of the conference was to evolve a single policy statement, for which purpose Trimble was a very suitable choice. He became a leading light in the working party that adopted a federalist blueprint for the constitution of the United Kingdom. Trimble first met both Enoch Powell and James Molyneaux there.⁹ ‘His was a very clinical kind of approach,’ recalls Molyneaux. ‘He was not at that stage concerned about whose toes he trampled on. And there was the natural tendency of anyone in that age group to have a very strong idea and to take it to the limit – and to shoot down any old fogey.’¹⁰ If Trimble was intellectually arrogant, it certainly did him little harm: he spoke in nearly every debate and he remembers Ernie Baird telling him that he was the success of the conference. Later, Craig also asked him to draft the rule book for a new organisation of which little was then known: the Ulster Workers’ Council. At first, it was one of of innumerable organisations of the period, which seemed to arise and then disappear with dizzying regularity – but it would soon acquire great significance. Not that anyone, recalls Trimble, would have needed to consult such a constitution: the exercise was purely to give the organisation a veneer of procedural respectability in the event that anyone had asked. Moreover, it brought Trimble into contact with Harry Murray, a Belfast shipyard shop steward who chaired the UWC and lived in Bangor (and who often gave Trimble lifts into the city).¹¹

      The momentum which built up in favour of the UUUC’s rejection of Sunningdale was not confined to the working classes. It was more broadly based, and as during the first two ‘sieges of Drumcree’ in 1995 and 1996 implied at least a level of middle-class Unionist acquiescence in street protest. The source of this discontent was quite simple: the deal did not seem to be delivering what it promised to do. The first major blow came after the Executive had taken office on 1 January 1974. The Ulster Unionist Council – where Faulkner’s margins had been thinning ever since he accepted the White Paper in May 1973 – rejected Sunningdale by 427 votes to 374. The motion was proposed by John Taylor and was seconded by Martin Smyth. Faulkner promptly resigned as party leader, and although he took the Executive members and others with him, he was now completely detached from the bulk of the party machine.¹² Shortly thereafter, a former Fianna Fail Cabinet minister, Kevin Boland, launched a High Court challenge to the Irish Government’s recognition of Northern Ireland’s present constitutional status. He claimed that it conflicted with Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s 1937 Constitution. When the Government mounted its defence, it emerged that they were arguing that they had not after all acknowledged that Northern Ireland was outside the jurisdiction.¹³ The consent principle, so crucial to Unionists, was fatally undermined by a clever legal formulation. The effects on Faulkner were more devastating still: so much so that when the United Kingdom General Election for Westminster was held on 28 February, the UUUC defeated every sitting Unionist candidate who was loyal to Faulkner and won eleven out of the twelve Ulster constituencies. Their slogan was, ‘Dublin is only a Sunningdale away’.¹⁴

      The February 1974 election was the closest thing there would be to a referendum on Sunningdale, and for the first time rejectionists could claim to have a popular mandate. Labour were back in power, and Harold