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

in the Commons,’ says the former Secretary of State.⁹ Fergus Finlay also states that Trimble never asked the Irish Government to endorse the concept of a deal without Sinn Fein: without them, Finlay believes, the UUP leader could never realise his ambition to be Prime Minister of a stable Northern Ireland.¹⁰ Again, this was partly because Trimble felt that the British state from the outset was not going to place republicans beyond the pale, and would work tirelessly to restore the broken ceasefire. Indeed, Major told Trimble that the decision to return to armed struggle was taken by a curiously informal grouping of 20 senior republicans and not through the more ‘formal’ mechanisms of the IRA Army Council; the actual operation was run by a very tight group based in the Republic, not involving Northern Irish ‘assets’, though some of the participants were northerners. Trimble drew the inference that the South Quay bomb may not have been the settled view of the whole organisation. Indeed, he says that there are many unanswered questions about the role of Adams and McGuinness in that bombing.¹¹ On 1 March 1996, Trimble told the Irish News that if there were to be an IRA ceasefire which means ‘a change of heart’ he would not want to create ‘unnecessary obstacles about Sinn Fein’s involvement in all-party talks’. All he asked for was adherence to the terms of the Mitchell Report. ‘Mitchell does talk about parallel decommissioning, not prior decommissioning. If we had reasonable commitments we would be able to move in that direction.’¹²

      In his first lengthy disquisition on the end of the ceasefire, published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday February 12, Trimble stated that the purpose of the bombing was to stop elections to his proposed body from taking place. This later turned out to be unlikely, for the simple reason that the IRA’s decision to return to ‘war’ was taken well before the Forum idea was accepted by the British Government. But whatever the real reasons for their actions, it was certainly inept of Trimble to identify this as a cause of the bomb: it implicitly validated the nationalist notion that Major’s actions in ‘binning’ Mitchell and alighting upon the glancing reference in the International Body’s Report to the elective route had in some way precipitated South Quay. But did the IRA resumption of violence work from their perspective? Many in nationalist Ireland, and not a few Unionists, certainly believed as much, pointing to the announcement of all-party talks made on 28 February 1996 at Downing Street by Major and Bruton.¹³ Bruton disagrees with this notion, observing that the decision to set a date for such negotiations had been taken in principle when the British Government accepted Mitchell as Commission chairman in November 1994. Bruton also notes that the log-jam on prior decommissioning had already been broken by the elective route of the Forum: he feels that Trimble received insufficient credit for this idea.¹⁴ But the manner and timing of the announcement of a date for all-party talks made it appear as though the Provisionals had ‘put manners’ on the two Governments.

      Trimble decided straight after the South Quay bomb to head to the United States to brief Clinton on what had happened, taking the advice of John Holmes, the Prime Minister’s new Private Secretary before he did so. When Ken Maginnis and Donaldson arrived at the White House on Monday 12 February at 2 p.m. they found a President who seemed ill at ease. Trimble said he was surprised at the timing of the bomb. ‘Yeah, it was stupid, damned stupid,’ lamented the Commander-in-Chief, referring to the fact that the blast took place at the very moment that there was a chance of all-party talks. But Trimble says he never asked Clinton to place the Provisionals beyond the pale at this moment: ‘They [the US Administration] know best what leverage they have,’ Trimble explains. ‘There is no point in telling them what to do.’¹⁵ He shares the conventional British wisdom that this blast came as a tremendous shock to Clinton, thus prompting a reappraisal of White House attitudes towards Northern Ireland. In fact, Trimble’s recollection is not quite correct: he asked that Adams’ visa to the USA be rescinded and that there be a ban on fundraising by Sinn Fein, but both these options were rejected by the US Administration. Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, rejected this reasoning, stating that ‘Mr Adams is an important leader in this process because he speaks for Sinn Fein. It is hard to imagine a process making progress towards peace without the active involvement of Sinn Fein.’ Partly, the White House’s unwillingness to place Adams beyond the pale can be ascribed to the fact that the British Government did not want to do so, either: they favoured Adams’ admission to the USA and for the doors then partially to close on him as a sign of displeasure as exemplified by the Sinn Fein president’s exclusion from the annual St Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Trimble did, however, attend a dinner of the American-Ireland Fund on St Patrick’s Day at which Gerry Adams was present – another small breach in the wall of taboos surrounding the republicans (Trimble had initially not wanted to attend, but feared the consequences of ‘exclusion’ if he did not turn up).¹⁶

      Once the immediate shock of the South Quay bomb had passed, the attention of the political classes on both sides of the Irish Sea moved to the form of election to the new assembly and to the format of the talks. Trimble and the UUP did relatively badly in this. Indeed, Andrew Hunter noted in his diary of 21 February 1996 that ‘Secretary of State [Mayhew] worried about the case for elections to a Peace Convention. Believes it is difficult to find solid, objective justification. Michael Ancram and I argued that elections justified on pragmatic grounds; no other way to get Unionists into all-party negotiations … Not much optimism in our discussion. Implicit agreement that PM overegged elections in his Mitchell response.’ Yet Trimble was himself partly responsible for affording the British Government the space which it needed to make the elective process ‘work’ vis-à-vis nationalist Ireland. As early as 24 December 1995, he had suggested in a Sunday Tribune interview that the assembly ‘could take evidence from the Republic, from the Irish Government and other interested bodies’ about possible North-South cooperation. The new body would not be a recreation of Stormont, he noted, but rather would be time-limited to two years (though it was a point which he never had much success in conveying). Trimble’s proposal was very considerably short of joint management of the talks but Irish offficials approvingly noted the UUP leader’s flexibility. Later, Trimble indicated that if the questions were framed in the right way and if it was clear that it was not an island-wide referendum, he might under certain circumstances back John Hume’s idea of a plebiscite in both jurisdictions simultaneous with an assembly election (concerning the right of the Irish people, north and south, to self-determination and their right also to determine the method whereby that might be achieved). There was, of course, another imperative behind his need to obtain an elective process: Trimble says that if he won an election, he would greatly increase his authority within the UUP.¹⁷

      Trimble’s position within the UUP helps to explain his concerns about nationalist successes in diluting the Assembly idea: he was worried at least as much by the appearance as the substance. In a memorandum to Major, dated 22 February, entitled ‘UU outline talks scheme’, Trimble stated that there was some limited flexibility on when the Provisionals could begin decommissioning – effectively a green light to the British Government considering the other pressures on them. But on the presentation, there was no such hint of flexibility: ‘The announcement of the elections for the Peace Convention and the associated talks should avoid the usual Anglo/Irish style, i.e. it should avoid the language typical of Stormont Castle/Iveagh House joint productions,’ stated Trimble. ‘There should be no references to the two Governments jointly sponsoring or jointly managing the Peace Convention or the talks.’ In the end, the Ground Rules for Substantive All-Party Negotiations paper produced by the British Government in March 1996 gave precisely that impression: to the intense annoyance of Trimble, it was sent out while the Unionist leader was in America and suggested that the Irish Government be the joint coordinator of the negotiations.¹⁸

      The crucial next step of setting a date for all-party talks was complicated – and dramatically