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

to it being deniable in the event of exposure. His reasoning was two-fold. First, terrorist deaths had risen from 62 in 1989 to 76 in 1990 (an increasing proportion of which were by loyalists) and he was determined to do something to reduce them. Second, he was informed by John Hume – who since 1988 had been engaged in a much criticised dialogue with Gerry Adams – that republicans were engaged in their own process of revisionism. According to this conventional interpretation of events, the IRA recognised that the ‘war’ was unwinnable, at least as traditionally defined, and that if the conditions were right they might wish to ‘come in from the cold’. They had reached a ceiling of 30 to 40 per cent of the nationalist vote and were finding it hard to break out of such electoral ghettoes in Northern Ireland – let alone the Republic, where their support remained minimal after the republican movement’s decision in 1986 to end the policy of abstentionism from the Dail. The public response to this was Peter Brooke’s Whitbread Lecture of 9 November 1990, in his Westminster South constituency, where he first formulated the phrase that Britain had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Significantly, an advance text was shown to Sinn Fein.⁴²

      At the same time as such possibilities seemed to offer themselves, the Government was also engaged in trying to coax Unionists back into the political mainstream. Partly, it was a function of British disillusionment with the AIA. First, it had not yielded the end to violence and the levels of security cooperation with the Republic for which the British had hoped. Second, as Patrick Mayhew recalls of his subsequent term in office from 1992–7, the AIA ‘was like a lead necklace, not so much for its content as the secretive way in which it was foisted upon the Unionists. It precluded me from saying what I wanted to say, “trust me”.’⁴³ It was possible, but distinctly harder, to operate ‘direct rule with a Green tinge’ with only minimal cooperation of the representatives of the majority community; and it was certainly impossible to obtain agreement for more broadly based, popular institutions of government, without them. But how could it be done without scrapping the AIA, or at least suspending it, the minimum requirement of Unionists? Under Tom King, Secretary of State from 1985–9, Thatcher was reluctant to make even the most tacit, public admission that the AIA had been anything other than beneficial; but where King failed to gain her approval for a gesture to win over Unionists, Brooke succeeded. The result was Brooke’s other major address, of 9 January 1990, to a gathering of businessmen in Bangor: in his bid to launch inter-party talks and devolution, he urged Unionists to end their ‘internal exile’. If they did so, then the AIA would be operated ‘sensitively’.⁴⁴

      After the failure of the protest campaign against the AIA, Unionists were also anxious for a way out. British ‘revisionism’ of the AIA seemed to offer this. Aided by a ‘suspension’ of the AIA and the Maryfield permanent secretariat whilst talks took place, they opted to participate in the elaborately constructed, three-stranded approach, first announced by Brooke in March 1991. The concept of the three strands would provide the framework for all future negotiations and structures: Strand I, chaired by Brooke and his successors, would focus on the internal governance of Northern Ireland – with the aim of restoring some sort of devolved institutions. Although any devolved parliament or council would not be based upon majority rule, Unionists would still be the largest bloc and it would, therefore, constitute an institutional structure of sorts to protect their interests. Inevitably, nationalists always sought to hedge about and to restrict its powers. By contrast, the Strand II talks (which had an independent chairman) catered for the Irish identity. Their purpose was to create North-South bodies – of greater or lesser degrees of autonomy from the northern and southern legislatures – which, nationalists hoped, would over time acquire greater powers and thus form the basis for an all-Ireland government. Inevitably, Unionists always sought to limit their remit. Strand III dealt with the east-west dimension – that is, the wider context of British-Irish relations. For long, it was the ‘poor relation’ of the strands – but it was the one which most interested David Trimble.

      Molyneaux seems to have calculated that there would be no agreement. On this, he was proved right and talks eventually collapsed in November 1992.⁴⁵ Nationalists had little reason to make an accommodation at this particular point. For it was the Unionists who were desperate to be rid of the AIA, not nationalists. Thus, if the talks failed, the worst that could happen would be that the Agreement would simply resume its normal workings, and another impasse combined with further IRA violence might even prompt an Anglo-Irish Agreement Mark II or Joint Authority. Nonetheless, it seemed reasonable to the UUP to suppose that if they were flexible – which included going to Dublin for the Strand II talks without the DUP – they would be rewarded in some way for taking risks. This, combined with British disillusionment with the AIA, led them to believe that the Government would then return to a more Unionist agenda. It was not altogether a fanciful conception, since during the 1992 General Election, Major had successfully taken up the theme of the Union: he particularly had Scotland in mind, but he also referred to the ‘four great nations’ of the United Kingdom and Brooke had attacked Labour’s ’unity by consent policy’ during the campaign. After the election, the NIO team headed by Patrick Mayhew was ‘just about as Unionist as the current Conservative party could produce’.⁴⁶ In the meantime Molyneaux decided to play along with the three-stranded formula for those very tactical reasons. But although ministers acknowledged after the failure of the 1991–2 talks how far the UUP had moved, and that SDLP intransigence had undermined progress, the party never received a pay-off commensurate to the extent of its flexibility. This was because at the moment when Unionists hoped that the British Government might adopt such an agenda, a far bigger prize than the re-entry of the weakening Unionist community into the restructured institutions of government in Northern Ireland became a real possibility. That potential prize was, of course, an IRA ceasefire.

      Retrospectively, therefore, the work of the 1991–2 UUP talks team looks rather peripheral to what was really going on. Indeed, as has been noted, Trimble devoted himself to what then seemed to be the most marginal issue of all: to develop the Strand III ‘basket’ of the talks, which resembled the old Vanguard concept of the Council of the British Isles. In the short term, his focus on this matter seemed largely to have had the effect of annoying his colleagues, as much on grounds of style as of substance. Ken Maginnis, who later became a staunch ally of Trimble, was less than impressed: ‘I thought that he was intolerable at that time. He had a purely theoretical approach to the situation without any sense of the practicalities. And his only friend in a parliamentary party full of non-graduates was the other Queensman, John Taylor [with whom Trimble shared an office]. The two were considered to be academically a cut above the rest.’⁴⁷ Substance divided the two men as well. Whereas Trimble wanted to forge ahead on Strand III, Maginnis wanted to push ahead on the North-South bodies. Trimble was riveted by Brian Faulkner’s experience: that powerful cross-border institutions could prove to be the vehicle for smuggling unionists into a united Ireland. His view was that the AIA and any such Strand II structures could be transcended by bringing them into a wider context – of regions cooperating with each other on an equal basis.⁴⁸ Maginnis thought this to be nonsense. Far better to deal with Dublin one-on-one, where Unionists had some real negotiating muscle, than in such a large community of variegated peoples. In this entity, he argued, the Ulster Unionists would end up as a small, isolated group in one vast pressure cooker. When its deliberations turned sour, as they easily could when the British had to take into account their relations with the Irish Republic and other regions, there would then be enormous pressure within the unionist family to withdraw from such a body.⁴⁹ Whoever was right, there can be no doubt that once again Trimble had done little to endear himself to his colleagues at Westminster. But the dramatic events of the coming three years made such tensions irrelevant. For Trimble would soon become the main beneficiary of the challenges posed to traditional Unionism by the British state’s increasingly strenuous attempts to treat with republicanism.