TRIMBLE may have been the youngest and most junior UUP MP – but he was already acquiring a reputation as the party’s most intellectual elected representative. Indeed, he did remarkably well to maintain his historical and intellectual interests after his election to Parliament. Trimble’s main efforts lay in two pamphlets for the Ulster Society.1 The first, The Foundation of Northern Ireland (1991), sold out its complete print run of 2000: it recounted familiar events leading to Partition and immediately thereafter, but gave them a ‘revisionist’ twist. Far from being simply the ‘gallant little Ulster’ taking its stand against the Fenian hordes and a faithless British Government, Trimble painted a much more complex picture. Its real political interest lay in the fact that here – at the heart of the Ulster Society – was a Unionist MP again praising Sir James Craig for going unprotected to Dublin to negotiate with terrorists. ‘At home, there were some who were ready to criticise Craig, but what was not in dispute was his enormous physical and political courage,’ noted Trimble. The paper was written at the time of the Brooke-Mayhew talks of 1991–2 and its aim was to show that Unionists could once again make up for their lack of political power through manoeuvre and tactical adroitness: the Craig – Collins pact, believed Trimble, had worked in the Unionists’ favour. It also provided a sharp critique of Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism at Westminster, following their triumph in the south in the General Election of 1918. By declining to take up their seats, they were unable to affect the direction of the debates on the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the Unionists had the field to themselves. In the following year, Trimble produced another paper for the Ulster Society, entitled The Easter Rebellion of 1916. Its main interest lies in its rarity value, for few Ulster Unionist MPs had ever bothered to tackle this subject seriously, and it was a competent survey of the secondary literature. Indeed, even so formidable an adversary as Martin Mansergh, who became adviser to successive Fianna Fail leaders, acknowledges the quality of Trimble’s researches in his recent collection of essays, The Legacy of History.
But of greatest significance to Trimble himself was the lengthy preface which he wrote in 1995 to Gordon Lucy’s study The Great Convention: The Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892, again published by the Ulster Society. Trimble describes it as ‘the closest thing to a personal political credo which I have written’. The 1892 Convention was held in Belfast as a response to Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill. Trimble believed that this body had been mis-characterised by R.F. Foster in Modern Ireland 1600–1972 as a symbol of the Protestant Ascendancy, whereas he believed that it was an authentic popular response by the democratic majority in Ulster to the prospect of being coerced into a Catholic state. In fact, Trimble was not entirely fair to Foster on this: Foster certainly employed the term ‘Ascendancy’ but he also acknowledged that ‘[the Convention] constituted a class alliance that was underestimated by Irish nationalist and British politicians alike’.2 Whatever the rights and wrongs of Trimble’s analysis, few Ulster Unionist MPs of the Troubles era – with the exception of Enoch Powell – would have had the intellectual self-confidence to challenge Foster.3 Even bolder in the light of Trimble’s own political circumstances at the time was his foreword to the Ulster Society’s republication of C. Davis Milligan’s study, The Walls of Derry: Their Building, Defending and Preserving. Penned in 1996, it contains an intriguingly favourable reference to the trenchworks built before the siege by Governor Robert Lundy. To this day, Lundy is a hate figure in Ulster Protestant lore for supposedly betraying the Williamite cause by virtue of his lack of enthusiasm for resisting the Jacobite forces. Relatively recent scholarship suggests, however, that he was fainthearted or just plain ‘realistic’ in his assessment of the city’s prospects.4 Years later, of course, Trimble himself would be accused by his loyalist detractors of being the ‘Lundy’ of this era. Yet, curiously, his attempted rehabilitation of Lundy stirred little controversy at the time it was written. Whatever its actual political significance, Trimble certainly loved being ‘the cleverest kid on the block’ and he would have enjoyed nothing more than penning a quirky, contrarian rehabilitation of such a man.
There can be no doubt that the Ulster Society dramatically raised his profile in the Province at large: the fact that its headquarters was located at Brownlow House helped him secure the nomination for Upper Bann. And the scores of talks which he gave and attended throughout Ulster brought him into contact with hundreds of grassroots Unionists, which helped mightily when he ran for the leadership in 1995. Trimble had plenty of time for such activity, since he was scarcely part of the UUP’s most inner councils under Molyneaux. Michael Ancram, who became Political Development Minister in 1993, recalls that Trimble was not someone that ministers would come across a lot, not least because sustained dialogue had in large measure broken down after the end of the Brooke-Mayhew talks in November 1992; nor, says Michael Mates, did he accept invitations to dinner at the minister’s Belfast residence at Stormont House.5 Trimble was thus a peripheral player in the negotiations which led to the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993, issued jointly by the British and Irish Prime Ministers – one the most important statements of intergovernmental strategy issued in 30 years.
Some such pronouncement was a cardinal aim of the republican movement: Major had been told as much by Charles Haughey at their summit in December 1991. Haughey said that the Irish Government’s soundings led them to believe that if the language was right, a declaration of principle could help to bring about an end to IRA violence. Hume, who had been engaged in his dialogue with Adams since 1988, also said as much and had his own draft version of what such a document would look like. In essence, Hume – Adams envisaged that in exchange for a ceasefire, the British Government would become a ‘persuader’ for a united Ireland and would gradually ‘educate’ Unionists into accepting the inevitability and logic of such an outcome. Major was, as ever, very cautious. Contrary to the widespread belief in Irish nationalist circles, this was not primarily a function of his shrinking majority after his narrow re-election in the 1992 General Election, and the need for the support of the nine Ulster Unionists in the Commons. Rather, Major’s caution over the emerging dialogue with republicans owed at least as much to his consensual style of management of the Cabinet and of the Conservative backbenches, whatever the numbers. Patrick Mayhew recalls that he hardly made a move without the support of the whole Cabinet Northern Ireland Committee, for he wanted to be sure that any initiative he took would not be disowned if it went awry.6 The sceptics on this inner group included not merely such well-known Unionist sympathisers as Viscount Cranborne, leader of the Lords, and Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, but also the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, and, at times, Michael Heseltine. The reason for their doubts was simple: 25 years of terrorism (not least the murders of Gow, Neave, the casualties of the Brighton bomb, and the mortar attack on Downing Street) had given a new lease of life to the profound dislike and distrust of republicanism within the Conservative political elite (whatever their views of Ulster Unionism as a creed or Ulster Unionists as individuals). Furthermore, many MPs knew of servicemen or civilians from their constituency who had been slain or injured. Indeed, Andy Wood, then Director of Information at the NIO, reckoned that one of the little noticed by-products of 30 years of violence was that Northern Ireland at a human level has become much closer to the rest of the United Kingdom than it had been at the start of the Troubles. He calculates that as many as several hundred thousand troops have made their way through the Province – whereas, by comparison, hardly anyone from the mainland had been there in 1969.7
Major’s consensual approach also governed his dealings with the Unionists. Whatever personal feelings, Major was certainly of the opinion that any new arrangements had to comprise at least the Ulster Unionists, if not the DUP. In that sense, there could be no repetition of the AIA. But how were these two objectives – bringing in the IRA whilst keeping the UUP on board – to be reconciled? After all, Hume was hated within Unionism for his dealings with Adams. It would,