Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

The RUC were thus in an extremely difficult position. They were obliged legally to do whatever was necessary under the Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987 – to minimise the threat to life and property. But in this context, it was hard to define what ‘minimisation’ meant. Did it mean locally, or Province-wide? Blair Wallace, then Deputy Chief Constable for Operations, recalls that the potential nightmare for the RUC was to allow 1000 loyalists to march in the teeth of the opposition from the residents as well as the possibility that ‘heavies’ might infiltrate the recesses of the nationalist estate in ones and twos without the knowledge of the residents. If this resulted in bitter hand-to-hand combat, the RUC would be condemned both for imposing Orangemen on the community and for allowing the two sides to fight it out. At a minimum, says Wallace, the RUC feared that there might be distasteful scenes comparable to those outside Sean Graham’s bookmakers at Belfast’s lower Ormeau Road on 8 July 1992, when Orangemen in Belfast had taunted nationalists at the scene of an earlier massacre by the UFF – which had helped to turn the Ormeau Road into another flashpoint during the marching season. If reproduced on television, such scenes would not only make a settlement of that dispute harder to achieve, but would also have a ‘knock-on effect’ upon other contentious parades such as at Bellaghy, Co. Londonderry. Moreover, recalls Wallace, it was the first year of the first IRA ceasefire, which was looking shaky. This was especially the case following nationalist riots on 3 July, triggered by the release of Private Lee Clegg of the Parachute Regiment, who had been convicted of the murder of a Catholic girl (a conviction that was subsequently quashed).10

Such were the circumstances in which Assistant Chief Constable Freddie Hall, who commanded the southern region, would decide whether the march could proceed under the terms of the Public Order Order.11 At 12:15, he decided to halt the march in consultation with his senior colleagues in southern region. At 12:50, Trimble took the first symbolic steps down the road, followed by 803 other Orangemen. There, they were faced by a phalanx of the RUC’s grey, Hotspur armoured Land-Rovers. The RUC contingent comprised six to seven Mobile Support Units, each with four to five Land-Rovers, consisting of one Inspector, four sergeants, and 24 constables. At this stage, they were all in soft gear as opposed to full riot mode. Rev. John Pickering called to his wife at the Drumcree Rectory, ‘Quick, you might never see the likes of this again.’12 Trimble walked at the head of the brethren and when he arrived at the road block he decided not to stop but rather continued walking on the route until he could not go any further – ‘as was my right’.13 From his perspective, Jim Blair recalls that Trimble charged straight into the nearest officer, who staggered back. There, the two men stood eyeball to eyeball. ‘That was the first demonstration of physical contact between an Orangeman and the police, and was seen by all of the officers of Portadown District,’ says Blair. ‘It was an indication of how he was prepared to wind the situation up.’14 Later that afternoon, Trimble and Harold Gracey, then Master of Portadown District No. 1, went into Portadown to talk to the assembled loyalists, where Trimble urged them again to keep the protests going; they were almost prevented from returning to Drumcree by an RUC road block. According to Gordon Lucy, the two men then had their first serious conversation. ‘If this goes badly, you and I have to be the last two people to leave,’ Trimble told Gracey.15 He remembers thinking that failure was more likely than not – hence, he believes, the possible reluctance of Rev. Martin Smyth, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland to turn up (Smyth states that he had commitments in London and wanted to stay in touch with the Government – and therefore sent Molyneaux, who held high rank in the Loyal Orders, to Portadown. He claims that he thought all along that the Orangemen would win).16 Trimble’s doubts were assuaged by the massive numbers who spontaneously turned up in support of Portadown District. Those present would be entertained by the bands, some with mighty 17th-century lambeg drums, weighing 40 pounds and three foot in diameter and depth, which rejoiced in names such as the ‘Earl Kitchener the Avenger’.17 These unalloyed expressions of solidarity buoyed up Trimble in the subsequent negotiations with the RUC. Trimble claimed on the basis of information from Orange sources that, at times, there were a mere 30 nationalist protesters who could easily be swept away. Hall, though, denied this was the case and said that the opposition to the march would be much more substantial. Jim Blair states that the actual numbers were closer to several hundred, with who knows how many ‘hard men’ hidden away.’18

Trimble and Gracey then briefed the crowd on events, and the local MP introduced the District Master to the assembled journalists. The next day, the Belfast Telegraph quoted an RUC officer’s observation that Trimble was ‘grossly irresponsible’.19 But it was Gracey’s remarks which were of greater significance on this occasion. He told them ‘be it days, hours, or weeks, we will stay until we walk our traditional route’.20 It was now to be a fight to the finish to preserve Ulster-British culture. Everything, they felt, had been taken away from them: their Provincial Parliament; their locally controlled security forces; the right to display pictures of the Sovereign; the right to fly Union flags and to wear Glasgow Rangers T-shirts in the workplace; and much else besides. All of these, in their eyes, had fallen foul of the Dublin/SDLP/Sinn Fein/IRA-inspired reforms, to which weak and duplicitous British Governments had acceded in order to buy themselves a quieter life. Now even their marches, already greatly reduced in number, were to be re-routed or even banned, and that in the year of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of the Diamond in Co. Armagh, which led to the formation of the Orange Order.

The numbers began to build up further, and by 10:15 p.m. Ian Paisley had arrived. The relationship between Trimble and Paisley was never going to be an easy one, not least bearing in mind Paisley’s past attacks on Trimble. Some, such as Jim Blair, thought that Trimble was in awe of the ‘Big Man’; but others, such as Rev. Pickering, thought that Trimble was very much in the lead role in his own constituency and that Paisley deferred to him more often than not. Indeed, Pickering remembers that at a subsequent gathering, Paisley kept looking at his nails until Trimble was fetched – he would not brief those present until the local MP arrived.21 Whatever the truth of the matter, it was at this meeting that Trimble suggested a compromise, whereby a smaller but still substantial contingent would go down the Garvaghy Road. Hall discussed it with Chief Superintendent Terry Houston, the RUC divisional commander. All they undertook to do was to examine the possibility of allowing the half-dozen Portadown District officers to march. This was unacceptable to the Orangemen but Trimble acknowledged that, from their perspective, this was at least a move in the right direction. Paisley then went and addressed the crowd and denounced the reduced numbers suggested by the RUC, and thereafter went to see Blair Wallace to try to persuade him to change the ruling. Other observers described ‘a surreal atmosphere – a mixture between a military camp and a scout jamboree’, with accordion and flute music playing to keep up the morale of the protesters. That night, Trimble tried to obtain some rest in his Renault Espace: he never went home during Drumcree 1995, nor was he able to shower and change clothes. But he was constantly interrupted by ‘alarums and excursions’, such as Paisley returning from his meeting with Blair Wallace. Scrambling to put his shoes on, Trimble emerged dishevelled and with his tie askew. Paisley then told him that Wallace could not help in the way they would have wished. Later, Trimble was again pulled out of his car, bleary-eyed, this time in order to becalm the Orangemen who were becoming aggressive towards the RUC. His techniques could be unorthodox and showed a sure grasp of street confrontation: when the loyalists became convinced that they would be the recipients of a rush attack by the RUC, Trimble took the lead and stood with his back to the police, making it psychologically harder to baton charge the Orangemen. ‘They’re not going to charge with my back to them,’ advised Trimble. The idea was picked up by some of the Orange stewards, who employed later it on. In the process, recalls Houston, ‘he could become very red in the face, so much so that we were concerned about his blood pressure’.22

The next day, Trimble attended a meeting at Carleton Street Orange Hall between senior Orangemen and the RUC. Relations between Trimble and Hall, the key figure on the RUC side, were anything but easy. The Upper Bann MP disliked what he saw as Hall’s penchant for such fashionable concepts as ‘conflict resolution’ techniques, which he had learned at training courses at Police Staff College at Bramshill and with the FBI. In fact, Hall was an officer with much front-line experience, during the course of which he had incurred serious wounds; in 1977, he was awarded a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, the two men proved to be ill-matched for each other during these tensest of circumstances and Trimble began to criticise Hall’s conduct of the crisis. ‘Mr Hall, one of your problems is that you do not listen,’ snapped the local MP.23 Hall did not, however, respond to Trimble’s accusations and held his peace. But little came out of these tense exchanges. At 5:30 p.m., they met again, this time in an RUC vehicle. Trimble reiterated his compromise of allowing a ‘substantial’ number of Orangemen down the road. Yet Trimble felt more optimistic than before. Far from melting away, ever greater numbers of Orangemen were assembling; with loyalist womenfolk bringing copious quantities of food, they were better provisioned than the RUC. By now, Larne was blocked and protests were erupting everywhere, and in the Fountain estate in Londonderry, the last Protestant enclave on the west bank of the River Foyle, residents had erected barricades. Then came the news that the Garvaghy Road Residents would begin direct talks at 7 p.m., rather than demand unilateral re-routing of the parade. The Orangemen felt that this was not possible because of Mac Cionnaith’s conviction for terrorism and, in any case, Trimble and others would be attending or speaking at the mass rally scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Nonetheless, some kind of progress was being made. At the suggestion of the RUC – and with the agreement of the residents and of Jeffrey Donaldson – the Mediation Network had already begun to explore the possibilities for an agreement. The Mediation Network, now Mediation Northern Ireland, had originally been established in 1987 and stated that its mission was to be an ‘impartial “outsider” in situations of conflict assisting people to resolve or manage difference in ways which promote human dignity and mutual respect’. As Terry Houston recalls, the RUC knew that they had no ‘in’ with the Garvaghy residents. It was agreed that Mediation Network would shuttle back and forth between the parties.24

The rally by Drumcree church attracted 25,000 to 30,000 loyalists from all of the Province’s counties, as well as Orangemen from Cavan and Monaghan in the Republic and representatives of Scottish lodges. Trimble was forced to leave the platform during Paisley’s speech after he was told that there was trouble brewing down by the police lines. Trimble mounted one of the RUC Hotspurs and sought to quieten the crowd, but instead he was booed. Gracey and Trimble then sought to obtain a passage through RUC lines to speak to senior officers. Trimble indicated his desire for a parting of the solid police line so that he could make his way through; this was obtained and just after Trimble secured entry a T-shirted young loyalist sought to rush after him further to breach the cordon, as it were. The RUC ranks closed promptly and a mêlée ensued. Stones began to fly from the Orange side and police reinforcements charged forward, leaving Trimble exposed behind RUC lines with stones flying from behind and riot squads charging straight at him: with his face down, one of the policemen almost did not recognise him and he narrowly escaped injury. He was then invited to take shelter in an RUC Land-Rover. Harold Gracey, who frequently had strong disagreements with Trimble thereafter, still had no doubts as to his physical courage. ‘There was no fear in him, nor did I ever hear him swear once,’ recalled Gracey. ‘Although his hands did move and wave about like a Frenchman!’25

Trimble returned to Drumcree church hall for fresh negotiations with the Mediation Network. The Mediation Network reported that they had discussed a range of issues with Mac Cionnaith. These discusssions were then interrupted by news of further disturbances, as Orangemen sought to envelop the police lines and more plastic baton rounds were fired. Trimble and Donaldson arrived and agreed with the RUC to conduct further talks at Edward Street station in Portadown centre. The RUC now seemed to the Orangemen to be closer to accepting Trimble’s compromise about ‘substantial’ numbers going down the road, if not the traditional full complement – in other words, Portadown District and nobody else from outside the area. The Orangemen then offered to go down six rather than two abreast to allow the parade to pass off more swiftly and without a band. Hall, though, did not give a 100 per cent guarantee. Both sides present were worried, each for their own reasons, about raising expectations – a point which Trimble emphasised by raising and lowering his hand off the table. But from the Orange perspective, this represented further progress: the focus of the conversations now became ‘how’, rather than ‘whether’.26 The RUC were also more optimistic after this: Trimble now appeared to accept their contention that 200 loyalists could not commence a surprise march down the road at 4 a.m., which would trigger major disorder, and that there would have to be some kind of prior tacit arrangement with the residents. (The point about the Garvaghy residents’ likely reaction had been forcibly made by Brendan McAllister of the Mediation Network at the meeting.)27 Trimble went back to the Orangemen, partly to segregate the Portadown from the non-Portadown Districts in the hope that some such compromise might come off. But privately he was becoming ever more anxious. The closer that they came to 11th night, with great Province-wide bonfires on the eve of the 12th July, the greater the likelihood of massive disturbances in support of the thwarted Portadown brethren. Portadown District Lodge proclaimed that unless the affair was resolved by 7 a.m. on the morning of 11 July, they would march at a time of their choosing.

Portadown rose the next morning to what Brendan McAllister of the Mediation Network, surveying the scene from the hill at Drumcree, describes as ‘the orange glow of the dawn, with the sun rising to sounds of lambeg drums’.28 Slowly, the police Land-Rovers began to move down the hill, away from the Orangemen, and to point towards the nationalist residents. By this time, they feared that the march might go ahead; growing numbers were already sitting down on the Garvaghy Road. The Land-Rovers reversed course back towards the Orangemen. Trimble was worried that some Orangemen had gone home believing that there was an agreement to march; things could go nasty if it turned out that the decision was then reversed.29 The local MP duly went to the Drumcree Rectory and telephoned RUC headquarters at Knock, where he spoke to the other Deputy Chief Constable, Ronnie Flanagan, the senior duty officer. He warned Flanagan of the gravity of the situation, and then rang Molyneaux to ask that he use his influence with the Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, to secure a speedy resolution to the affair and to overturn the ban: Molyneaux had greater standing with the RUC as the long-time leader of the Province’s largest party. At around 8 a.m. Houston shifted position and stated that he would seek to take the Orangemen down the road as quickly as possible. The final ruling was delayed until Blair Wallace and Flanagan arrived from Belfast to oversee the new decision. A compromise of sorts seemed to be emerging. It appears to have been understood that Portadown District only would go down, with no bands, and minimal police presence. This meant that Trimble could not walk since he was only there in an ex officio capacity, nor could Paisley. Trimble was not very happy with this, but accepted for the sake of the march in the years to come. Instead, he would meet the marchers by Shillington’s Bridge, once they were safely past the controversial part of the route and were well on their way to returning to Carleton Street Orange Hall. But the events which surrounded the closing of the deal remain controversial. The nationalists believed that there was no question of parades going down that route next year without the consent of the local community – a point which the Mediation Network organiser relayed to Brendan Mac Cionnaith and which persuaded many nationalist residents to voluntarily remove themselves from the road. The Orangemen claim that they would not have been party to any oral agreement that denied their right to march.30 According to Flanagan, the agreement was that there would be no march on the next day – 12 July itself – and subsequently the Orangemen made no serious attempt to walk the route on that occasion. Whatever was actually agreed, the episode had the effect of enhancing the nationalist sense of grievance when the main march went down the road in 1996.31

Meanwhile, the Orangemen would have to fall back to facilitate disengagement of the two sides. Jim Blair then walked the length of the RUC line. As he went along, he tapped each Hotspur with his 30-inch blackthorn swagger stick (a prerogative of senior policemen since the days of the old Royal Irish Constabulary, but banned after the RUC’s replacement by the new Police Service of Northern Ireland) thus signalling that the vehicle should move back.32 At 10:30, Gracey led the 800 or so Orangemen down the hill, past the silent residents of the Garvaghy Road, who had removed themselves from the thoroughfare at a given signal. According to Gordon Lucy, those who participated remembered above all else the sound of tramping feet. By the time they arrived at Shillington’s Bridge, an atmosphere prevailed that was reminiscent of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike: Jim Blair in all his years as a policeman never saw a scene like it, with ex-servicemen weeping tears of joy.33 Trimble, who rejoined them now, was exhausted rather than emotional. As the march swept up to Carleton Street, the Orangemen came to a halt. A shout went up for Gracey and then for Trimble and Paisley. Paisley, though, seemed to be forging ahead. Trimble knew that he had to do something to maintain his status as Paisley’s equal. ‘My thought was, “I don’t want this fellow walking in front of me, upstaging me.”’ Thus it was that the two men clasped hands at chest level, as they took the salute of the admiring throng. ‘By this gesture I made sure that we would both be walking side by side,’ Trimble says.34 ‘No words were spoken,’ recalls Paisley. ‘It was a spontaneous gesture.’35 But he had no realisation of how this episode would be seen, nor even that cameras would be present. Thus was born the idea that Trimble had danced a jig with Paisley down the Garvaghy Road in full view of the Catholic residents – though, in fact the episode took place approximately a mile away on Carleton Street, in front of loyalists. If Trimble’s account is right, the walk with Paisley down Carleton Street was born of opportunism and relief, rather than innate triumphalism. But the oddest part of this episode is that no one viewing the video of the event could ever suppose that any kind of dance was going on. The idea that the two men performed a jig may originate with the editorial in the Irish News of 12 July 1995 (the day after) which accused Trimble of ‘dancing’ over the feelings of his nationalist constituents, but this was obviously meant in a metaphorical sense only. Certainly, neither the Irish News nor the Belfast Telegraph of 11 or 12 July mentions either Trimble or Paisley ‘holding hands’ or ‘dancing’; and, as was shown years later in his comments on the iniquities of ‘line dancing’, Ian Paisley took a dim view of jigging with women, let alone male political rivals. One theory advanced by the writer C.D.C. Armstrong is that the comedian Patrick Kielty in his BBC Northern Ireland comedy show in the autumn of 1995, showed the film of Trimble and Paisley holding hands and put it into reverse at high speed, thus making it appear as if they were dancing. Whatever the strange origins of this myth, it became ever more embedded in the consciousness of nationalist Ireland. Shortly thereafter, Trimble would compound the anguish of local nationalists by denying that there had been any compromise struck with their representatives, and this would make it harder to resolve the crisis in the following year. Trimble acknowledges that the image of him ‘dancing a jig’ down the Garvaghy Road was ‘unhelpful’ and that it was exploited in ways that were detrimental to the Orange interest. He was determined to ensure that it did not happen again and he pointedly refused to be ‘chaired’ by the crowd during Drumcree 1996.36 The bitterness which attended the close of proceedings obscured the real achievement of the RUC and the Mediation Network – to have secured some sort of agreement between the Orangemen and the nationalist residents. It was certainly the last occasion on which there was any kind of consensus and henceforth the march would either effectively go down by force majeure or not at all.37

In the eyes of the British Government, the first ‘siege of Drumcree’ confirmed their suspicion that none of the Unionists could be trusted; one civil servant who observed Patrick Mayhew at close quarters remembers that it confirmed him in his conviction that the Northern Protestants were sui generis. Even now, Mayhew says that Trimble’s performance was ‘undoubtedly triumphalist, and there’s no point in saying it wasn’t’.38 He remembers that the Irish Government – not understanding how the relationship between police and politicians differs between Northern Ireland and the Republic – assumed that the Ulster Secretary could just snap his fingers and obtain the result he wanted. Fergus Finlay, the special adviser to Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, recalls coming back from holiday to find a new hate figure in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin – David Trimble.39 The television critic of the Irish Times was scathing: ‘Ruddy, gloating and pompous, David Trimble’s face filled the screen.’40 Nuala O’Faolain, writing in the Irish Times, thought that the irresponsibility of men such as Trimble and Paisley would turn places such as the Garvaghy Road into ‘little Mostars’ (a reference to the scenes of devastation in the Bosnian War). ‘They don’t have to live, of course, where their neighbours hate them and they hate and fear their neighbours. They just do what harm is to hand, and go home to their comfortable houses,’ she observed.41 To many of his critics, Trimble’s behaviour was reminiscent of nothing so much as John Hewitt’s description, in his poem ‘Minister’, of the young Brian Faulkner – who initially made a name for himself as a hardliner for his role in ensuring that an Orange parade went down the Longstone Road in Annalong, Co. Down:

Not one of your tall captains bred to rule

that right confirmed by school and army list

he went to school, but not the proper school.

His family tree will offer little grist

to any plodding genealogist;

his father’s money grew from making shirts.

But with ambition clenched in his tight fist,

and careful to discount the glancing hurts,

he climbed to office, studiously intent,

and reached the door he planned to enter, twice

to have it slammed by the establishment.

A plight that well might sympathy command,

had we not watched that staff of prejudice

he’d used with skill turn serpent in his hand