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

Major understood that Molyneaux had a hugely difficult act to perform on his own party, and was determined that he be afforded the space to do so by negotiating a formulation that was more acceptable to the UUP. More was the key word. For Molyneaux would never be able to throw his bowler hat into the air over a text designed to draw in the Provisionals. All that was needed, says Michael Ancram, was that he should acquiesce in it.⁸ To that end, Major extensively consulted Molyneaux: Molyneaux recalls that from 18 October 1993 onwards, he and the Prime Minister met on a weekly basis. One British official who participated in these meetings recalls that Molyneaux would often say ‘“I don’t think my folk will wear this”; sometimes, he was acting as a spokesman for the state of party opinion, sometimes he was using it as a vehicle for expressing his own discontents’. The British, in turn, would play this back in their innumerable negotiations with the Irish Government. Such confidence-building measures became all the more vital after the Shankill bomb killed nine Protestants in October 1993 and the revelations of secret contacts between British Government representatives and the Provisionals; thereafter, they would take place three times a week. After all, Major had said that such discussions would ‘turn my stomach’. Was there another secret deal, asked unionists – this time between the Provisionals and the British Government? Molyneaux, who was consulted at an ever more frantic pace along with his advisers, became convinced that there was no such conspiracy. His authority was still sufficient to carry the Ulster Unionists with him – thus also forestalling a revolt from the 30 or so Tory backbenchers who might have baulked at the text of the Joint Declaration had the UUP leader given the signal.

      British ministers and officials to this day remain well pleased with their work on the Downing Street Declaration. In Michael Ancram’s words, ‘we delivered a pretty Orange document in green language’.⁹ According to this reading, the British Government was merely reiterating what it had already conceded – that it had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in staying in Ulster – indicating to Hume and the IRA that they were neutral rather than imperialistic in motivation, and that republicanism’s real ‘British question’ was how to deal with close to a million pro-British subjects in the north-east corner of Ireland. The British Government was now a facilitator for an agreed Ireland – again, Hume’s concept – but that was not necessarily a united Ireland. Such a polity could only come about if consent was freely and simultaneously given by the people of Ireland, north and south. Partition was secure in that Ulster folk would determine whether there would be Irish unity and not the Irish people as a whole, as the republicans wanted. Moroever, the British would simply seek to uphold those democratic wishes, be they for unity or the status quo and, crucially, would neither seek to persuade nor to coerce Ulster into any new arrangements. Unionists were told that it was significant that it was the Fianna Fail Government of Ireland – traditionally the ‘Greener’ of the Republic’s two main parties – which acknowledged a united Ireland needed the consent of the majority in Ulster. Both Governments added that all could participate fully in the democratic process if a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods was established. In his subsequent explanation of the DSD in the Dail, the Irish Foreign Minister, Dick Spring, defined a ‘permanent’ abandonment of violence as including ‘the handing up of arms…’. British ministers also made such demands – a point which annoyed Adams greatly in early 1994 when he told the Irish News on 8 January 1994 that ‘they [the British] want the IRA to stop so that Sinn Fein can have the privilege twelve weeks later, having been properly sanitised and come out of quarantine, to have discussions with senior civil servants of how the IRA can hand over their weapons’. The terms on which Sinn Fein/IRA gained access to the negotiating table and even the new institutions of government in Northern Ireland would prove to be one of the most vexing questions of the coming years.

      To someone like Trimble, the language of the Declaration ought to have made for very uncomfortable reading. First of all, there was the very fact of the statement itself: a foreign government with an illegal territorial claim was once again pronouncing upon the future of Northern Ireland. Second, it spoke of the ‘people’ of Ireland – whereas Trimble, who subscribed to the B&ICO’s ‘Two Nations’ theory, believed the Ulster-British to be a breed apart. Third, though it acknowledged the right of the majority in Northern Ireland to determine its constitutional future, it repeatedly posited the idea that any changes in that status would inevitably be in the direction of Irish unity, rather than towards still closer relations with Britain. But for all his doubts (which in part centred around the fact that because Molyneaux went alone to Downing Street, he could be outmanoeuvred) Trimble was reluctant publicly to denounce the document in which his leader had such a hand. To have done so, Trimble says, would have pushed him into the Paisleyite camp and would forfeit him such limited access as he then enjoyed.¹⁰ Any fears which the NIO may have harboured that he would be the source of right-wing opposition to the DSD were thus never realised. ‘If we are suspending judgment today on this statement today, it is in the hope that it will lead to a way out of the cul-de-sac in which the people of Ulster have been condemned for the last eight years,’ he observed in the Commons on the day of the signing of the DSD. Instead, he focused upon the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in Northern Ireland – partly a reference to the system of legislating for the Province via Orders in Council rather than properly debated and scrutinised Bills.¹¹

      With hindsight, Trimble feels that Molyneaux did a fairly good job in removing the ‘Greener’ elements within the Hume – Adams conception.¹²It was an early indication that Trimble, unlike Robert McCartney, did not regard the peace process as a fraud designed to deliver a united Ireland by stealth; rather, it was something which, if the terms were right, was worth studying and could yield fruit. In Trimble’s eyes, that fruit was the tantalising prospect of no more impositions from above, such as the abolition of Stormont by Westminster in 1972, or the AIA of 1985. This, he hoped, would be a settlement which Unionists would be able to shape for themselves rather than being left to wait ‘like a dog’, in Harold McCusker’s famous phrase, outside the conference chamber as the future of the Province was carved up.¹³ Paisley swiftly detected Trimble’s modulated position, describing him in a speech to the annual dinner of the Tandragee, Co. Armagh, branch of the DUP in early 1994 as ‘plasticine man’ over the DSD: Trimble was ‘being made to look up, look down, look left and look right in whatever way he was punched by events’.¹⁴

      The Provisionals, for their part, never endorsed the DSD – if only because they could never then accept that Northern Ireland was the relevant unit within which the consent principle should be exercised – but it nonetheless contained enticing amounts of ‘Green’ language. This was emphasised by both Reynolds and Hume, thus enabling it to become an important building block in the construction of the first IRA ceasefire of 31 August 1994 – although Adams may have gambled that the ‘precondition’ about decommissioning would be waived more swiftly than was actually the case. Whilst republicans debated the DSD’s contents and requested ‘clarification’ from the British Government (in an attempt to draw them into public negotiations before a ceasefire had been called), Trimble urged that they not be allowed to dictate the pace of progress. Hume had told the British and Irish Governments that there would peace within days of the DSD, but it had not been forthcoming. ‘The government have held the carrot,’ Trimble observed. ‘Now it is time for the stick. Militarily they should clobber the Provos.’ He became the pre-eminent advocate in the Commons of the idea of the then Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Hugh Annesley, to allow wiretap evidence to be used in court (partly, he argued, because such evidence could sometimes assist in the defence of the accused).¹⁵ From his knowledge of European law, Trimble also urged that the Italian-style, mafia-busting investigating magistrates be brought in to deal with the IRA.¹⁶ He named a number of alleged provisional IRA godfathers.

      Trimble’s interpretation of the IRA’s decision