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

both for imposing Orangemen on the community and for allowing the two sides to fight it out. At a minimum, says Wallace, the RUC feared that there might be distasteful scenes comparable to those outside Sean Graham’s bookmakers at Belfast’s lower Ormeau Road on 8 July 1992, when Orangemen in Belfast had taunted nationalists at the scene of an earlier massacre by the UFF – which had helped to turn the Ormeau Road into another flashpoint during the marching season. If reproduced on television, such scenes would not only make a settlement of that dispute harder to achieve, but would also have a ‘knock-on effect’ upon other contentious parades such as at Bellaghy, Co. Londonderry. Moreover, recalls Wallace, it was the first year of the first IRA ceasefire, which was looking shaky. This was especially the case following nationalist riots on 3 July, triggered by the release of Private Lee Clegg of the Parachute Regiment, who had been convicted of the murder of a Catholic girl (a conviction that was subsequently quashed).¹⁰

      Such were the circumstances in which Assistant Chief Constable Freddie Hall, who commanded the southern region, would decide whether the march could proceed under the terms of the Public Order Order.¹¹ At 12:15, he decided to halt the march in consultation with his senior colleagues in southern region. At 12:50, Trimble took the first symbolic steps down the road, followed by 803 other Orangemen. There, they were faced by a phalanx of the RUC’s grey, Hotspur armoured Land-Rovers. The RUC contingent comprised six to seven Mobile Support Units, each with four to five Land-Rovers, consisting of one Inspector, four sergeants, and 24 constables. At this stage, they were all in soft gear as opposed to full riot mode. Rev. John Pickering called to his wife at the Drumcree Rectory, ‘Quick, you might never see the likes of this again.’¹² Trimble walked at the head of the brethren and when he arrived at the road block he decided not to stop but rather continued walking on the route until he could not go any further – ‘as was my right’.¹³ From his perspective, Jim Blair recalls that Trimble charged straight into the nearest officer, who staggered back. There, the two men stood eyeball to eyeball. ‘That was the first demonstration of physical contact between an Orangeman and the police, and was seen by all of the officers of Portadown District,’ says Blair. ‘It was an indication of how he was prepared to wind the situation up.’¹⁴ Later that afternoon, Trimble and Harold Gracey, then Master of Portadown District No. 1, went into Portadown to talk to the assembled loyalists, where Trimble urged them again to keep the protests going; they were almost prevented from returning to Drumcree by an RUC road block. According to Gordon Lucy, the two men then had their first serious conversation. ‘If this goes badly, you and I have to be the last two people to leave,’ Trimble told Gracey.¹⁵ He remembers thinking that failure was more likely than not – hence, he believes, the possible reluctance of Rev. Martin Smyth, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland to turn up (Smyth states that he had commitments in London and wanted to stay in touch with the Government – and therefore sent Molyneaux, who held high rank in the Loyal Orders, to Portadown. He claims that he thought all along that the Orangemen would win).¹⁶ Trimble’s doubts were assuaged by the massive numbers who spontaneously turned up in support of Portadown District. Those present would be entertained by the bands, some with mighty 17th-century lambeg drums, weighing 40 pounds and three foot in diameter and depth, which rejoiced in names such as the ‘Earl Kitchener the Avenger’.¹⁷ These unalloyed expressions of solidarity buoyed up Trimble in the subsequent negotiations with the RUC. Trimble claimed on the basis of information from Orange sources that, at times, there were a mere 30 nationalist protesters who could easily be swept away. Hall, though, denied this was the case and said that the opposition to the march would be much more substantial. Jim Blair states that the actual numbers were closer to several hundred, with who knows how many ‘hard men’ hidden away.’¹⁸

      Trimble and Gracey then briefed the crowd on events, and the local MP introduced the District Master to the assembled journalists. The next day, the Belfast Telegraph quoted an RUC officer’s observation that Trimble was ‘grossly irresponsible’.¹⁹ But it was Gracey’s remarks which were of greater significance on this occasion. He told them ‘be it days, hours, or weeks, we will stay until we walk our traditional route’.²⁰ It was now to be a fight to the finish to preserve Ulster-British culture. Everything, they felt, had been taken away from them: their Provincial Parliament; their locally controlled security forces; the right to display pictures of the Sovereign; the right to fly Union flags and to wear Glasgow Rangers T-shirts in the workplace; and much else besides. All of these, in their eyes, had fallen foul of the Dublin/SDLP/Sinn Fein/IRA-inspired reforms, to which weak and duplicitous British Governments had acceded in order to buy themselves a quieter life. Now even their marches, already greatly reduced in number, were to be re-routed or even banned, and that in the year of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of the Diamond in Co. Armagh, which led to the formation of the Orange Order.

      The numbers began to build up further, and by 10:15 p.m. Ian Paisley had arrived. The relationship between Trimble and Paisley was never going to be an easy one, not least bearing in mind Paisley’s past attacks on Trimble. Some, such as Jim Blair, thought that Trimble was in awe of the ‘Big Man’; but others, such as Rev. Pickering, thought that Trimble was very much in the lead role in his own constituency and that Paisley deferred to him more often than not. Indeed, Pickering remembers that at a subsequent gathering, Paisley kept looking at his nails until Trimble was fetched – he would not brief those present until the local MP arrived.²¹ Whatever the truth of the matter, it was at this meeting that Trimble suggested a compromise, whereby a smaller but still substantial contingent would go down the Garvaghy Road. Hall discussed it with Chief Superintendent Terry Houston, the RUC divisional commander. All they undertook to do was to examine the possibility of allowing the half-dozen Portadown District officers to march. This was unacceptable to the Orangemen but Trimble acknowledged that, from their perspective, this was at least a move in the right direction. Paisley then went and addressed the crowd and denounced the reduced numbers suggested by the RUC, and thereafter went to see Blair Wallace to try to persuade him to change the ruling. Other observers described ‘a surreal atmosphere – a mixture between a military camp and a scout jamboree’, with accordion and flute music playing to keep up the morale of the protesters. That night, Trimble tried to obtain some rest in his Renault Espace: he never went home during Drumcree 1995, nor was he able to shower and change clothes. But he was constantly interrupted by ‘alarums and excursions’, such as Paisley returning from his meeting with Blair Wallace. Scrambling to put his shoes on, Trimble emerged dishevelled and with his tie askew. Paisley then told him that Wallace could not help in the way they would have wished. Later, Trimble was again pulled out of his car, bleary-eyed, this time in order to becalm the Orangemen who were becoming aggressive towards the RUC. His techniques could be unorthodox and showed a sure grasp of street confrontation: when the loyalists became convinced that they would be the recipients of a rush attack by the RUC, Trimble took the lead and stood with his back to the police, making it psychologically harder to baton charge the Orangemen. ‘They’re not going to charge with my back to them,’ advised Trimble. The idea was picked up by some of the Orange stewards, who employed later it on. In the process, recalls Houston, ‘he could become very red in the face, so much so that we were concerned about his blood pressure’.²²

      The next day, Trimble attended a meeting at Carleton Street Orange Hall between senior Orangemen and the RUC. Relations between Trimble and Hall, the key figure on the RUC side, were anything but easy. The Upper Bann MP disliked what he saw as Hall’s penchant for such fashionable concepts as ‘conflict resolution’ techniques, which he had learned at training courses at Police Staff College at Bramshill and with the FBI. In fact, Hall was an officer with much front-line