It was into this seething cauldron that Trimble returned on Sunday 7 July. He left his RUC personal protection unit at Carleton Street – they could not accompany him to an Orange event – and joined the brethren in the field; that night, he slept on the floor in the church hall at Drumcree. An amazing cross-section of Ulster society was to be found resting there that night, including the Star of David Girls’ Accordion Band!14 But one innovation enabled him to stay in touch with the wider world in a way that had not been possible in the previous year. In the intervening months, he bought a mobile telephone, which became a kind of omnipresent trademark. By Sunday night, it was estimated that 10,000 Orangemen had turned up out of solidarity. The RUC was starting to feel stretched. Road blocks disappeared as swiftly as they emerged; on Monday evening alone, they would have to police 230 small to medium-sized parades. The atmosphere swiftly darkened, rioting occurred overnight in Belfast, Ballymena, Carrickfergus, Londonderry and Portadown. The next morning, the body of Lurgan taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick – a 36-year-old Catholic, newly graduated from Queen’s, with one child and a pregnant wife – was found in his cab near Aghalee, Co. Antrim: he had been shot twice in the head.15 No one claimed responsibility. Trimble said that ‘if it should turn out to be a sectarian murder, it will be condemned unreservedly’. He went further: ‘This is the sort of thing we don’t want to see. It is just the sort of thing that we have repeatedly appealed to persons in paramilitaries not to do.’16 Not everyone was as robust. David Ervine of the PUP-UVF initially said that his party did not engage in the ‘politics of condemnation’ – reminiscent of the formula sometimes employed by republican spokesmen when commenting upon IRA actions.17 Suspicion immediately focused upon the highly independent mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF, headed by the dissident Portadown loyalist, Billy Wright. Later, McGoldrick’s family claimed that ‘fire and brimstone speeches’ and ‘loose talk’ by politicians had partly been responsible for the taxi driver’s death.18
As the protests mounted, Trimble wrote to George Mitchell to inform him of the UUP’s withdrawal from the talks until the authorities ‘come to their senses’.19 The M1 and A1 were blocked, and Aldergrove airport was sealed off. Eventually, Larne harbour closed as well. David Kerr recalls driving with Trimble to a meeting with Mayhew in Belfast: shortly after they turned off the Birches roundabout on to the M1, the UUP leader saw three plumes of smoke rising eerily in the distance. ‘That’s Lurgan, that’s Portadown, that’s Craigavon,’ he noted.20 At one point, David Campbell, a young Orangeman who was organising the protests in Lagan Valley met with Trimble and John Hunter by the Drumcree church hall. Campbell noted the support that the demonstrations enjoyed. ‘Give the word, the people are there and willing to do it,’ Campbell told the UUP leader. ‘Let’s take the country.’21 According to Hunter, Trimble gulped at that moment.22 And he added: ‘No, we don’t need to do that.’23
By comparison, there were few serious disturbances at Drumcree itself, though the tension rose further. Such was the strain that the Orange leadership suggested that crush barriers be used to separate the two sides, as might be erected on the occasion of a Royal visit. The RUC agreed to the creation of barriers, but the Orangemen misunderstood their shorthand and it soon emerged that what was being put up was concrete and barbed wire akin to those on dangerous border crossings. When the Orangemen asked to see the intended barrier (Trimble was worried what would happen if the Loyalists were pushed up against the wire) they were told that they could inspect it at St Paul’s Roman Catholic School. A group of marshals, accompanied by Trimble, went down to the school – only to find nothing there and that the wire was already being set up. Just then they heard the noise of a fracas coming from Drumcree. They were told on their mobile telephones that the police had begun to charge the Orangemen and to push them back. Trimble drove swiftly in an unmarked vehicle to the scene through the police lines at the end of the Ballyoran estate with truckloads of regular troops looking on. As they ran through the last of the police lines to reach their brethren, they found that the RUC had entered the cemetery, assuming their new position atop several graves: according to Harold Gracey, the RUC had promised him that they would never enter the cemetery.24 Although they offered no resistance, one Orangeman complained bitterly that it was the resting place of his father. Trimble gestured to the crowd to calm down in the face of what he, too, saw as an ‘escalation by the RUC’ and urged them to sit down on the road: it would then be harder for the RUC to charge them again. He then went back to the cemetery where he was filmed gesticulating a lot at the riot squad and urging them to pull back. He suddenly noticed one officer pointing a baton gun towards him. Trimble could not see the number on his tunic – thus precluding the possibility of making a complaint since it would be impossible to establish the constable’s identity. ‘As the officer was eyeballing me I thought to myself, “this bloody man is quite capable of shooting me”.’25 It remains the most memorable image of Trimble in that year: quite apart from the nationalist community, it horrified many Unionists as well. ‘Unionists of my generation found it unacceptable to poke a finger at the RUC,’ says James Molyneaux.26 Curiously, for all of their differences, Mayhew did understand Trimble’s predicament. Andrew Hunter noted in his diary of 9 July 1996 that Mayhew said to him in a telephone conversation that ‘Trimble can’t afford not to be there’. Summarising the attitude of the Orangemen towards the UUP leader, Mayhew observed, ‘“We put you there, now do the stuff.” [Trimble is being] reasonably responsible.’
Trimble spent the night of Monday 8 July 1996 at home: unlike the first Drumcree, he was better organised and managed to return to his house for some sleep and a shower. The next morning, he and Daphne Trimble went to London. His reasons were two-fold. First, he had sought an appointment with Major to discuss the crisis – along with Paisley, McCartney and Rev. Martin Smyth in his capacity as Grand Master of Ireland. Second, he had been invited on the night of Tuesday 9 July 1996 to the state banquet at Buckingham Palace in honour of Nelson Mandela.27Trimble knew he had to put on a display of Unionist unity because the community wanted it and there was in any case no point in holding separate meetings.28 McCartney, though, recalls that Trimble objected to his presence and that it was Paisley who insisted that all of the Unionist leaders be there. ‘You’re being allowed into this meeting – but you’re not allowed to dominate it,’ Trimble told McCartney. To McCartney, this was a clear indication he was there on sufferance and he exploded. ‘You pompous posturing ass, how dare you speak to me in those tones!’: personal relations between the leaders of the various strands of Unionism were by then much worse than those which obtained between the leaders of constitutional and physical force nationalism.29 But once they were in the Prime Minister’s room in the Commons, the three party leaders emphasised that if the march did not proceed, the authorities might have eight or nine different Drumcrees on their hands.30 But it was the dealings which took place outside of the formal context of that meeting which were most significant. Before he went into the meeting, Trimble communicated to Major that he planned to ask the four main church leaders in Ireland to intervene in the Drumcree crisis: the Church of Ireland Primate of All Ireland, the President of the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the