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

And although Mitchell had not disavowed his own report of January 1996, he moved on with the intergovernmental consensus – which entailed constant dilution of the timing of its provisions.

      Above all, Mitchell personified the internationalisation of the conflict. As Peter Bell observes, all players in the Ulster crisis increasingly looked towards the United States. ‘We are now rather like those minor east Asian potentates described in Polybius’ history of Republican Rome,’ he states. ‘There we are, in that neo-classical setting in Rome on the Potomac, imploring Senators for favours.’²⁹ Irish nationalists might not have obtained all that they wanted, but the appointment of Mitchell and the willingness of Trimble to fracture the Unionist bloc could be represented as gains nonetheless. To northern nationalists such as Sean Farren, it was a far cry from the Unionist stance of 1996 and that of 1991–2, when they still regarded political discussions over the future of Northern Ireland as essentially an internal United Kingdom matter.³⁰ And to obtain revision of the rules, they had even turned to the Irish Government, further legitimising the southern role. Above all, it was done with the agreement of one man, David Trimble, who a mere six years earlier had been standing on the roof of Glengall Street protesting against the visit of the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey. Paisley was in no doubts as to what the events of that night meant. ‘That’s it,’ he told his party colleagues in the DUP room at Stormont. ‘There’s going to be an agreement now. Our task is to ensure that the people outside know what is going on and we keep Trimble to what he said. But he won’t work with us any more.’³¹

       EIGHTEEN The Siege of Drumcree (II)

      THE praise bestowed upon Trimble by ‘world opinion’ for his statesmanship in helping to seat Mitchell proved short-lived. The reason could be summarised in two words: Drumcree II. Trimble’s Unionist critics saw the new, unprecedented levels of opprobrium that were heaped upon him for his role in the Drumcree stand-off as all too predictable. They felt that it illustrated the pointlessness of basing key political decisions on the need to propitiate the ‘international community’. Unionists only ever won plaudits for the concessions they made; by contrast, any attempt to stand up for their vital interests in a vicious inter-communal conflict was regarded by many ‘right-thinking’ people as the moral equivalent of such IRA atrocities as the South Quay bombing. According to this analysis, Unionists should just concentrate on defending their way of life – since good PR came at a price and of its nature could never endure. Indeed, men like William Ross believed good PR was like a monster which had endlessly to be fed and which would end up devouring the traditional Ulster-British way of life.¹ From a very different perspective, Frank Millar of the Irish Times also wondered whether the UUP leader had not blown a golden opportunity in taking the stance that he did during Drumcree II. As he saw it, there was a brief window of opportunity in the Republic, where opinion had turned against Sinn Fein after a series of terrorist attacks. These included the killing of Garda McCabe on 7 June and the bombing of Manchester on 15 June.²

      But such calculations seemed at the time to be far removed from the real world of life in Portadown. There, tensions had once again reached fever pitch over the planned Orange march down the Garvaghy Road. For although Trimble liked to take the long view, especially now that he was leader of the UUP, he could not overlook the obvious: he was still the MP for the area, and no politician likes to say goodbye to a substantial portion of his electorate unless he absolutely has to do so. But it was very much a role thrust upon him – and it was a duty which the new, emerging Trimble scarcely relished. Indeed, Harold Gracey recalled that between July 1995 and July 1996, he hardly heard from Trimble, even though everyone knew the crisis was bound to come.³ There is other evidence that Trimble simply did not want to deal with the issue at all until he was forced to address it. The Garvaghy Road Residents Group claims that they wrote three times to Trimble in 1995–6 requesting talks to avoid a repetition of the stand-off, but received no reply. Trimble now states that his failure to respond owes something to laziness: he would have to have replied himself and would not have relished a correspondence which would have taken on the air of a debate. This last point was a source of frustration to him. He felt constrained by the rut into which loyalists had inserted themselves by adopting the tactic of not talking to the Residents Group – which in his opinion was then exploited by their wider republican enemies as evidence of intransigence.⁴ Since the option of talking to the residents was not open to him at this stage – indeed, he did not dare do so till 1999, well after he entered face-to-face negotiation with Sinn Fein/IRA’s leadership – he may well have wanted to avoid thinking about a tricky subject which he could not even handle on his own preferred terms.⁵ Indeed, many of the local Orangemen treated him as if he was one of their own in the security forces, such as the RUC Reserve and Royal Irish Regiment, and would not tell him the game plan. Gordon Lucy confirms that Trimble had remarkably little to do with the extensive Orange planning and preparations for the 1996 stand-off (by comparison, 1995 was a spontaneous protest).⁶

      Trimble was in Stirling on Saturday 6 July for the Boyne anniversary Orange walk, as a guest of the County Lodge of Central Scotland, when his mobile telephone rang with dramatic news: the Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Hugh Annesley, had decided to re-route the march. Until the last minute the UUP leader had been hopeful that the march could be taken down the road quickly and quietly.⁷ Annesley stated that purely operational considerations governed his decision, but few Orangemen believed him – and in this crisis it was again perceptions which counted for most on both sides. Trimble spoke for the Loyalist mainstream when he asserted incorrectly that the decision was taken by ‘those members of the RUC who regularly visited the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in the run-up to the decision … I think the strategists of the Department of Foreign Affairs believed, if Orangeism could be faced down during this summer, this would create a situation in which Sinn Fein could be enticed into talks.’⁸ Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme on the following Monday, he warned that Annesley’s decision was ‘placing at risk the tranquillity we have enjoyed over recent months’, a comment which Lucy says was principally construed as a reference to the fragility of the loyalist ceasefire.⁹ For this act of ‘scaremongering’, Trimble was criticised by Gary McMichael of the Ulster Democratic Party, the political wing of the UDA: ’I don’t think they [the UUP leadership] should be talking about the loyalist ceasefire being broken…[loyalist paramilitaries] shouldn’t be prompted by people like David Trimble.’¹⁰ Annesley later said that Mayhew offered him no advice on Drumcree. Annesley told him that either of the two options could potentially lead to disorder.¹¹ Yet Annesley’s ban did not find particular favour in the NIO, illustrating that the decision to re-route was not taken because of instructions emanating directly from the intergovernmental conference. ‘The Chief Constable took a principled decision,’ opines one senior civil servant but ‘It was not pragmatic and the result was near civil war.’¹² Sir John Wheeler remembers that even if Mayhew had been motivated by a political agenda relating to obtaining a new IRA ceasefire (the prospect of which appeared to have receded in recent weeks, anyhow) the Secretary of State would always have been hamstrung by his lawyerly belief in the constitutional proprieties concerning operational independence of the Chief Constable. Wheeler does, though, confirm the accuracy of one of Trimble’s contentions, that the Irish DFA wanted the Orangemen to be taught a lesson. ‘It was implicit in their arguments that we