Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

In the eyes of the civil servants, there were sound, time-honoured reasons of Whitehall practice about this: the Frameworks were, they insist, a quite different kind of document from the DSD. First, Frameworks was a negotiating document, not a definitive statement of principle. It was a starting point, and therefore to prenegotiate it with any one party, especially one which almost held a balance of power in the Commons, would expose the British to accusations of adopting an uneven approach. Such pious formalism contrasted with rumours emanating from Dublin. Most worrying from a Unionist perspective were the claims made by the former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds (whose Fianna Fail-led Government had fallen in November 1994 following a scandal and had been replaced by a coalition led by the more instinctively anti-republican Fine Gael leader, John Bruton) that all-Ireland bodies with executive powers had been agreed between the British and Irish Governments. This, of course, would have been a reprise of the Council of Ireland which had proven so offensive to Unionists during the abortive Sunningdale experiment of 1973–4 – or worse. Trimble was also receiving his own warnings from his old Vanguard colleague on the UUP liaison committee with the NIO, Reg Empey. These indicated, he believed, that NIO civil servants had ‘run amok’.27 Molyneaux tried to engage Major in a ‘control’ exercise, but by the time Major was prepared to show him a draft it was too late. Indeed, Molyneaux remembers that when Major invited him into the Cabinet room to look at the draft version, the Prime Minister said he would leave him sitting at the Cabinet table whilst he went upstairs – and the UUP leader should ring the bell when he was finished. Major pushed the explosive paper across to the septuagenarian Ulsterman; the Ulsterman promptly shoved it back in the direction from whence it came. Molyneaux pointed out that he could not influence its basic direction and that by looking at it on Privy Council terms he would thus become acquiescent in its provisions.28

Such concerns soon ceased to be the preserve of the Unionist political classes and became dramatically clear to the Unionist population and to the world at large. In January 1995, David Burnside was shown a draft copy of the Frameworks Documents. Before he placed it in the press, Burnside went to see Molyneaux. ‘I have seen them and it is terrible and disastrous.’ ‘What do I do?’ asked Molyneaux, taken aback. ‘Go and see Robert Cranborne,’ said Burnside, referring to the most ardent Unionist in the Cabinet. ‘I don’t want to compromise his position in the Cabinet.’ Burnside flared up: ‘For Christ’s sake, this is the Unionist cause we’re talking about here.’ Burnside also told Trimble of its contents, though the latter never saw the document and thus was unable to evaluate any later changes that were made when the final paper was actually published.29 The extracts were then shown to a Times leader writer, Matthew d’Ancona, a prominent Trimble fan in the London print media. It turned out to be one of the greatest journalistic coups of recent years. No. 10 and the NIO were enraged: the ‘spin’ was that d’Ancona had endangered the ‘peace process’, although ultimately it had the opposite effect. The Times front page pronounced that the Frameworks brought ‘the prospect of a united Ireland closer than it had been at any time since partition in 1920…today’s disclosures will alarm many Unionists who were promised by Mr Major last week that the draft would contain “no proposals” for joint authority’.30 It posited extensive all-Ireland bodies with executive powers. Although it was pointed out that some of the proposals in this draft had already been excised in the intergovernmental negotiations, the damage was nonetheless done. Major’s pep talk to the Conservative backbenches and to the nation rallied the party and mainland opinion; but in Unionist circles, Trimble recalls, Molyneaux was once again seen to have been overly trusting of a British Prime Minister.31 No. 10 felt that the leaks were less about the substance of the proposals than about the internal power struggle within the UUP. Realising that his flank had been exposed and that he had been unable to pull off the same success as over the Downing Street Declaration, Molyneaux asked Major to see three members of his own party in the Prime Minister’s room in the Commons behind the Speaker’s chair. The three included Trimble – potentially his most dangerous internal party critic – and two close allies, William Ross and Rev. Martin Smyth. Trimble took the lead, employing his lawyerly skills to assault the leaked paper. Nothing that Major said in any way reassured the Ulstermen.32 Trimble had already appeared to distance himself from the Tories: the Government noted that along with John Taylor, he abstained in the tight Commons vote on fisheries policy on 18 January 1995. With the exception of Ken Maginnis, the other UUP MPs voted for the then Government.33

Major had to persist, even though he knew that the Frameworks Documents were still-born: to have abandoned them, he felt, would definitively have proven to nationalist Ireland that the British Government was in hock to the Unionists. Instead, he opted to shave down the most controversial parts – much to the irritation of the Irish – in the hope that elements of the Frameworks would prove to be a basis for negotiation at a later date. When the Documents were published in Belfast on 22 February 1995, Unionists were not mollified. Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Fein seemed happy enough, telling a conference at the University of North London that ‘John Major, by the very act of publishing the Frameworks Documents in the teeth of opposition from right-wing Conservatives and the Unionist leaderships has demonstrated that his government is not totally hostage to the mathematics of Westminster’.34 The Strand I proposals posited a 90-member assembly, elected by PR, serving four- or five-year terms, with all-party committees overseeing the work of the Northern Ireland departments; their activity would be scrutinised by a three-man elected panel (Hume had envisaged a six-man panel, with EU and British and Irish Government representatives: this was his way of circumventing Northern Ireland’s in-built Unionist majority, but it was negotiated away by the British, not least because they feared that it would inflame neuralgic Eurosceptic sensibilities on the backbenches and in the Cabinet: ministers were mindful of the problems that might arise if the causes of Euroscepticism and Unionism became bound up with each other). Strand II, on the North-South dimension, reiterated many of the principles of the December 1993 Joint Declaration and stated that such bodies were to exercise ‘on a democratically accountable basis delegated executive, harmonising and consultative functions’. The designated topics for harmonisation would include agriculture and fisheries; industrial development; consumer affairs; transport, energy, trade, health, social welfare, education and economic policy. The remit of the body should be dynamic, enabling progressive extension by agreement of its functions to new areas. Its role should be developed to keep pace with the growth of harmonisation and with greater integration between the two economies. Furthermore, the Irish Government pledged to make changes to its Constitution which would fully reflect the principle of consent and which would show that no territorial claim of right contrary to the will of Northern Ireland’s majority be asserted.35

Major claimed that this renunciation was ‘crucial’ and that any such North-South bodies would not be free-standing but would rather be democratically accountable to the assembly. Nor, he said, was there a predetermined list of such functions as they would exercise: indeed, the definition of harmonisation in education, as revealed under paragraph 33, included such prosaic notions as mutual recognition of teacher qualifications. The NIO held this to be evidence that they had, once again, delivered an ‘Orange document in Green-speak’. Despite these glosses, and despite Major’s reiteration of the ‘triple lock’ – the formulation whereby any deal had to have the endorsement of the Westminster Parliament, and the people and the parties of Northern Ireland – the Unionists were not reassured. Nor were many on the Tory backbenches. If devolution, proportional representation and a Bill of Rights were so unsuitable for Great Britain, why were they suddenly so beneficial for Northern Ireland? In and of themselves, these were not great issues for David Trimble, though. Certainly, Ulster’s anomalous treatment vexed as much as it always had done, but Trimble was no purist defender of English constitutional norms as he saw them and he believed in a continent of empowered regions. Rather, Trimble’s worries focused on paragraphs 46 and 47: as Unionists interpreted them, these held that if the assembly ever collapsed, the default mechanism would allow the two Governments to continue to operate North-South bodies without any local input. Those bodies would be free-standing and not be set up by the assembly. They could, therefore, easily become the vehicle for creeping, even rolling unification. That this would be the case was proven by the fact that their functions were invested with a character that was described as ‘dynamic’, ‘executive’ and ‘harmonising’. The ‘d’, ‘e’ and ‘h’ words assumed a great importance to Trimble, as did the authority under which they operated: during the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement of 1998, Trimble devoted great amounts of his energy and political capital to excising these atrributes and to making sure that the Strand II institutions were explicitly accountable to the assembly. Even as they stood, the listed of areas of cooperation – such as health – were amongst the most sensitive for many unionists. After all, Catholic values still held sway on the medical ethics committees of hospitals in the Republic. How would greater integration with such a system affect the freedoms of Ulsterwomen within the NHS? Moreover, any hint that priests might have a hand in the upbringing of Protestant children was potentially explosive. Trimble further warned that British-Irish ideas for harmonising key welfare policies would threaten the right of the Province’s taxpayers to equality of treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom, for which Sir James Craig had fought so hard. Would Northern Ireland be harmonised down to the Irish level or would the Republic be harmonised up to the British level? Nor was Trimble satisfied with the apparent withdrawal of the Irish constitutional claim over Northern Ireland. Whilst the Irish undertook in Frameworks to withdraw the claim to jurisdiction, they did not satisfactorily expunge the claim to territory and thus denied Northern Ireland explicit legitimacy in southern eyes.

But the failure to keep the Ulster Unionists on board was much wider than just Major’s inability to tie the Irish down more precisely. Some senior figures in the Government felt that the failure to repeat the delicate balancing exercise of the DSD could be ascribed to the fact that whereas the DSD was mainly formulated out of No. 10, the Frameworks was mainly drafted in the NIO; and that officials such as Quentin Thomas had become too close to their Irish opposite numbers such as Sean O hUiginn and that they failed to see the political wood for the bureaucratic trees. Certainly, Molyneaux believed this and told Major that ‘they’ve double crossed us again’ – a variant of his old line that ‘the rats have been at work’.36 Was this really the case, though? It was always easy to blame civil servants, especially under the circumstances of direct rule in Northern Ireland. There, they wielded exceptional powers under ministers who were not MPs in Ulster and thus were not democratically accountable in the normal way. Moreover, much of their information on the correlation of political and military forces inevitably derived from secret organs of state. Certainly, Michael Ancram believes that Thomas had an instinct to undo Lloyd George’s historic error in agreeing to partition Ireland and that he frequently restrained Thomas from going too far.37 Not so, says Thomas. He claims that he was, in fact, trying to stabilise the status quo but that he also believed that British rule in Ulster was inevitably subject to a higher set of legitimacy tests than was the case for the Irish (as exemplified by the vastly greater protests whenever the RUC would shoot terrorists than when the same act was perpetrated by the Gardai). He says, rather, that he always believed that Northern Ireland’s general position should be determined by the consent principle.38 Other colleagues, such as Peter Bell, say that Thomas’ key conception was that Sinn Fein were lobsters and that the task of British statecraft was to tempt them into lobsterpots.39 At the time, Trimble also believed that attitudes such as those attributed to Thomas did much to explain why the Irish had won ‘hands down’ over the Frameworks. But there was also a bit of useful play-acting in all of this: officials such as Thomas were convenient bogeymen for Unionists, since it was much easier to lay the blame on treacherous advisers rather than the ruler himself. Appealing over the NIO’s head to No. 10 thus became a stock Unionist ploy, and one which would be played even by Trimble – who himself had little faith in the leaders of the modern Conservative party. Sometimes, it even worked, for successive occupants of No. 10 liked to flatter themselves that they could work their magic in ways that mere departmental ministers could not. At other times, the dance might even have been pre-choreographed between No. 10 and the NIO as part of a ‘hard cop, soft cop’ routine: it was sometimes useful to give Unionists the illusion that they were making progress, thus binding them ever more thoroughly into the process.

The effects on Molyneaux of the Frameworks debacle were immediate. Ken Maginnis, for one, told John Bruton that he thought that William Ross, a robust opponent of power-sharing, would be the beneficiary and succeed Molyneaux.40 On 18 March 1995, at the AGM of the UUC, a 21-year-old student named Lee Reynolds ran as a ‘stalking horse’ candidate against him. Reynolds declared that ‘the leadership record since 1984 is one of successive defeats and an ongoing weakening of the Union’. His seconder was one of Trimble’s closest associates and a Unionist intellectual, Gordon Lucy. Many supposed that Trimble was behind the challenge. Not so, says Trimble – a point confirmed both by Lucy and John Hunter, another close associate at the time. If anything, Trimble was worried that people would think just that and accuse him of disloyalty. Normally, the post went uncontested, but Reynolds received 88 votes to Molyneaux’s 521 or 14 per cent of the total.

Worse was to come for Molyneaux. Two days later, the independent Unionist MP for North Down, Sir James Kilfedder, suddenly died of a heart attack. The UUP chose Alan McFarland, a former regular Army officer, as its candidate in the by-election in this most middle-class of seats (many NIO civil servants also lived there, helping to make it in some ways the most recognisably ‘English’ division in Ulster). It was not, though, promising DUP territory. Who, then, would carry the torch for Carsonian Unionism and the concepts of equal citizenship? A more than suitable candidate emerged in the shape of Robert McCartney, a QC originally from the Shankill Road who had become one of the Province’s top-paid silks and lived in a spacious house at Cultra near Belfast Lough. Not only had he carved out a reputation as the most trenchant critic of the ‘peace process’; he was also a non-Conservative who refused to join the Loyal Orders. He thus appealed both to the prosperous middle classes and to ordinary voters (although that summer, substantial portions of the bourgeoisie were also in a militant mood, as exemplified by their hostility to the attempt by Queen’s University to stop playing God Save the Queen at graduation ceremonies and to replace it with the EU hymn, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy).41 McCartney – running under the ‘United Kingdom Unionist’ label but without a formal party organisation – beat the UUP candidate by 10,124 votes (37.0%) to 7232 votes (26.4%) on a 38.6% per cent turnout.42 Even though his native Bangor was in the seat, Trimble did not canvass for the UUP candidate: he says that he was not asked to do so.43 After 17 years in the UUP, he was still not a conventional party man.

TEN The Siege of Drumcree (I)

THE high politics of the Frameworks were of little interest to the mass of the Ulster-British population, but many of them felt that their national destiny was anything but secure. Every night on their television screens, clever and articulate Sinn Fein/IRA spokesmen seemed to win the battle of the airwaves hands down. It was part of the unremitting diet of defeat which the unionist community had suffered since 1985. But few Unionists, including Trimble, can have foreseen where their countrymen would choose to draw their line in the sand. That spot would be at Drumcree church two miles from Portadown town centre, in the heart of Trimble’s constituency. There, ever since 1807, local Orangemen had attended divine service on the Sunday before 12 July (it was the oldest recorded Orange service in the history of the Orange institution, and was almost as old as the Order itself). Thence they would march back to Portadown itself. There they would arrive to the ‘crack of the cane’ on a lambeg drum, their colourful banners – often depicting Biblical scenes – fluttering high. This scene has changed little from 1928, when the Belfast-born Catholic artist, Sir John Lavery, painted a Portadown 12th: he claimed in his diary never to have seen anything to equal its ‘austere passion’.1

Why was this? Because Portadown is, in the words of Sir John Hermon, a former Chief Constable of the RUC, ‘the Vatican of Orangeism’.2 Trimble also notes that local lodges boast a total of 1100 to 1200 members – in a town with a Protestant population of 20,000. Of these, over half are women and a quarter are juveniles, which means that perhaps as many as one in six of the eligible population are in the Order. Portadown District Lodge is numbered LOL No. 1, and as Trimble says, it regards that as being more than just an accident.3 A challenge to its prerogatives and traditions would not be suffered lightly. Disaster had narrowly been averted in the mid-1980s, when the town’s growing nationalist population demanded that parades through or close to Catholic areas be curtailed. Following negotiations with the RUC, the Orangemen surrendered the custom of passage down Obins Street. In exchange, they believed that they had won permanent right of passage down the Garvaghy Road – their traditional route to the town centre after completing the Drumcree church service on the Sunday before 12 July. They were reinforced in this belief by an RUC statement in 1986 claiming that ‘unlike the Tunnel area [where the Orangemen ceased to march], Garvaghy Road is a major thoroughfare in which Catholics and Protestants reside’. The RUC denied that any specific guarantees had been given about the Garvaghy Road – though they acknowledged that such restrictions rarely applied to major thoroughfares. Whatever the precise understanding, the parades had nonetheless gone off relatively quietly in the intervening years in the presence of the new local MP, David Trimble, who was invited as matter of courtesy to march with the District Lodge.4 Although scarcely an active Orangeman, Trimble was happy enough to take his place out of a sense of duty. Indeed, John Hunter remembers that Trimble loved turning round and watching the ranks of bowler-hatted brethren streaming down the hill to Portadown.5

But this time-honoured pageant was about to undergo its greatest challenge ever – which vaulted it into the forefront not merely of provincial concerns, but of national and international consciousness as well. For the Garvaghy Road Residents’ group, which claimed to represent the inhabitants of the nationalist housing estate which comprised part of the route of the Drumcree march, indicated that they were unhappy about the parade. They had become far more active in recent years and claimed that demographic changes in the area justified a re-routing of this offensive and intimidatory march. The Orangemen retorted that the march only skirted the nationalist estate and that in any case, the protest was orchestrated by Republicans in the person of Brendan Mac Cionnaith, convicted for offences related to the bombing of the Royal British Legion Hall in Portadown in 1981 (a point of particular significance since it was the ex-servicemen’s lodge which led the march down the Garvaghy Road). Many Orangemen saw the threatened street protests as an expression of aspects of TUAS – the IRA’s post-ceasefire strategy of Tactical Use of Armed Struggle. Republicans would thereby seek to heighten street tensions in order to provoke Orange reprisals. These would then enable them to portray themselves as defenders of the embattled Catholic community. Supporters of this contention rely on reports that Adams admitted in private to a Sinn Fein gathering at Athboy, Co. Meath, that the protests against a number of parades had not been spontaneous but that ‘three years of work went into creating that situation, and fair play to those who put the work in’.6 On the other side of the coin, Mac Cionnaith and other residents denied this and claimed it was simply a legitimate expression of nationalist rights.

On the morning of 9 July 1995, Portadown District prepared for their annual ritual in glorious sunshine, which would take them from Carleton Street Orange Hall in the town centre to the Drumcree church. The march out to Drumcree – not via Garvaghy Road – passed off quietly enough, and the service began at 11:15 a.m. During the course of it, Gareth Watson, then Deputy Master of LOL 273 spoke on several occasions to Superintendent Jim Blair, the RUC sub-divisional commander for the area. Watson had been formally appointed as Blair’s contact shortly beforehand and stayed outside the church throughout the service. As the Rev. John Pickering, the Church of Ireland Rector of the parish of Drumcree concluded his sermon and the singing of the National Anthem began, Watson saw a large number of RUC Land-Rovers heading for the church, apparently blocking the return route to Carleton Street. Subsequently, Blair called with some disturbing news for the Orangemen. He told them that there had been a disturbance on the Garvaghy Road, with sit-down protests by the residents. Blair said that the RUC blockage was there for the Orangemen’s protection, since a hostile nationalist mob might attack them, and that he would like to talk to the District officers. Portadown District duly brought David Trimble with them, relying upon him for political guidance. That said, Trimble had no master plan of action, nor any overall project in mind. Rather, he simply felt that he could not walk away and had to stay there out of a sense of personal honour and obligation to the men there.7

The Orangemen claim that the RUC did not immediately clarify the purpose of the blockage of the route in these talks: but they gave the impression that they were playing for time so that the police could clear the road. David Trimble told Gordon Lucy that neither he nor the District officers were told that the march would be ‘re-routed’.8 To increase pressure upon the RUC, some Orangemen went to Portadown to keep their brother loyalists informed. Two hundred Protestants soon blocked Corcrain Avenue, where they were serenaded by the Portadown Flute Band. Their number was joined by Billy Wright and boys, the commander of the UVF’s mid-Ulster brigade known widely as ‘King Rat’, who was suspected of the murders of numerous Catholics and republicans. Wright called the Nationalist residents a ‘rent-a-mob’ and threatened to match their numbers by bringing in loyalists from elsewhere in the Province. Wright was utterly convinced that the march was halted by the Government at the request of Cardinal Cahal Daly (the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland), John Hume and Gerry Adams. As Lucy notes, even if Wright’s contention was wrong, after the AIA and the start of the ‘peace process’ loyalists were in a mood to believe such charges.9 Wright et al. therefore determined to make a ban on the parade even costlier than letting the march down the road.