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

settled. The Irish state was then wholly sectarian. Changes had started with Vatican II but they were taking a long time to work their way through Irish society. Only in the last decade – partly under the influence of the divorce referendum, and the exposure of the paedophile priests – has social life ceased to be controlled by the [Catholic] Church. And then, of course, there was the embattled, declining southern Protestant community. I remember attending one Apprentice Boys of Derry function in the late 1980s at Raphoe, Co. Donegal, and them telling me “don’t end up in the same hole as us”.’¹⁰ Subsequently, though, in his UUP annual conference speech at Portrush, Co. Antrim, on 21 October 1995, Trimble approvingly quoted John Whyte as stating that the Republic was not merely a poorer society, but also a more unequal one on account of its retrograde housing and education policies.¹¹ In fact, much of Trimble’s analysis of the southern economy and society was already out of date. He tended to underrate the rise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ as a source of self-confidence to nationalists on both sides of the border, making the price which they would ask for any deal all the higher.

      Such was the baggage which Trimble carried on his first visit to Dublin as leader of the UUP. There was still a degree of reticence on the Unionist side about accepting this kind of invitation. Molyneaux had gone to Dublin Castle in 1992 as part of the Strand II segment of multilateral talks, but had not gone to bilaterals with the Irish at Government Buildings, where the Taoiseach’s office is located. Indeed, not since Terence O’Neill’s meetings with the then Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, at the Mansion House in 1965, and with his successor, Jack Lynch, at Iveagh House in January 1968, had a UUP chief gone south for this sort of exchange. Again, Trimble’s purpose in so doing was to kill such taboos once and for all.¹² He wanted to do so at this particular point when he was under relatively little pressure, rather than be forced to abandon this stance under duress during a crisis in the talks. But Trimble also wanted to make another point. He wanted to be seen to be meeting first with the Taoiseach rather than Dick Spring, whose department had day-to-day responsibility for Northern Ireland. Such a meeting also contained the implicit message that Trimble was the potential Prime Minister-in-waiting of Northern Ireland, the two men dealing as equals.

      After breakfasting at John Taylor’s house near Armagh, the Unionist team crossed the border. Their first task was to launch a book at the Mansion House written by two Unionist policy analysts, Esmond Birnie and Paddy Roche, entitled An Economics Lessson for Irish Nationalists and Republicans, which charged that a united Ireland made no economic sense and that the Republic in any case could not afford reintegration of the national territory. Under the gaze of Daniel O’Connell – whose portrait hangs in the Mansion House – Trimble signed the visitors’ book and wrote his address as ‘Lisburn, Co. Antrim, UK’. At the reception, afterwards, which was attended by de Rossa and the new leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, Trimble signed copies of the book. The reception had another significance in the longer run. For it was at this event that Trimble first met Eoghan Harris, the Sunday Times columnist, former Workers’ Party political strategist, and scriptwriter for the television series Sharpe. Harris describes himself as ‘a sort of Andrew Neil without the charm, a sort of Peter Mandelson without a party’, and had guided both de Rossa and Mary Robinson to their respective triumphs in the European election of 1989 and the presidential election of 1990.¹³ Harris was spotted in close conversation with the UUP leader, causing one journalist to remark, ‘he’s probably looking for an advice contract. They must be the only political party who he hasn’t advised.’ ‘Who said he hasn’t?’ responded another. The reporter’s hunch was prophetic.¹⁴

      The encounter with Bruton was in and of itself relatively unmemorable. Trimble stated his belief that all-party talks could not possibly begin by the end of 1995 because of Sinn Fein/IRA’s intransigent stance on the weapons issue. Bruton found Trimble to be not particularly au fait with the nuances of southern politics, but he noted that the UUP leader was prepared to take the chance of finding out more.¹⁵ A new channel of communication was established and regular meetings would be held in future. The media reaction was mostly positive: The Times of London speculated that Gerry Adams had met his match.¹⁶ Mary Holland of the Irish Times was impressed by Trimble’s boldness and reckoned that because of Drumcree he now had a stock of political capital to persuade his own community that the structures of government in Northern Ireland would never again be based upon majoritarian principles.¹⁷

      Holland also restated nationalist fears that John Bruton would be seduced by Trimble. But were these justified? Bruton, who was elected as the youngest TD in the Dail for his native Meath in 1969 was not merely the guardian of Fine Gael tradition – the party which founded the state and set up the institutions of law and order. Bruton’s own origins lay in the Centre Party, one of the successors to John Redmond’s Irish Party which until its final eclipse in the 1918 General Election at the hands of the old Sinn Fein had demanded Home Rule for Ireland within the United Kingdom (a picture of Redmond even hung above Bruton’s desk, and he enthusiastically devoured Paul Bew’s rehabilitation of Redmondism, Ideology and the Irish Question, of which he had been given a leather-bound edition by his officials for his 48th birthday in 1995). One of the sources of Bruton’s visceral anti-nationalism was the death of one of his closest friends, Senator Billy Fox. Fox was a Protestant legislator from Co. Monaghan who had been murdered by the Provisionals in 1974 whilst visiting his girlfriend (Bruton recalled the episode to effect in his debate on RTE with Ahern during the 1997 general election: Bruton also was advised by the ubiquitous Eoghan Harris).¹⁸ This episode inevitably informed his dealings with republicans. Bruton declined to give ‘sectarian coalitions’ public recognition of the kind which Albert Reynolds accorded them, notably the dramatic three-way handshake between that Fianna Fail Taioseach and Hume and Adams on the steps of Government Buildings in Dublin in September 1994.¹⁹

      Whatever Bruton’s own views, he was leader of an unlikely agglomeration known as the Rainbow Coalition – comprising Spring’s Labour party and de Rossa’s Democratic Left. Dick Spring as Minister of Foreign Affairs was much the most important since he ran Northern Ireland policy on a day-to-day basis. Spring came from a staunchly republican family in Tralee, Co. Kerry, and had inherited his seat in the Dail from his father, Dan: Spring père had been a staunch supporter of Charlie Kerins, a senior IRA figure executed in Mountjoy jail by the de Valera government in 1944 for murdering a Garda Sergeant.²⁰ Spring, a former rugby international, saw his own role in the government as a balancing act – not unlike the former West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the FDP, who switched from supporting the SPD of Helmut Schmidt to the CDU/CSU bloc of Helmut Kohl in 1982. He acted as a restraint on the instincts of the Fianna Fail-led Government of Albert Reynolds (backing the idea of a ‘suspension’ of the AIA in 1992 to make it easier for Unionists to enter into three-stranded talks); after moving over to a Bruton-led coalition in late 1994, many saw him as rectifying the new Taoiseach’s instinctive sympathy for Unionism and keeping republicans on board. The policy of the Irish state was largely settled, so any ‘innovations’ by Spring were as much about presentation as about substance. Trimble certainly genuinely disliked what he saw as Spring’s excessive solicitude for the republicans; but it was also because he felt the excessively ‘green’ spin which the Tanaiste and DFA officials placed on events made it that much harder for him to nudge the unionist community into accepting the full logic of the three-stranded process.

      Trimble was thus enraged when Spring told the UN General Assembly on 27 September 1995 that it was time for the British Government to abandon its insistence on a handover of IRA weapons ahead of all-party talks.²¹ And writing in the Irish Times on the morning of his