Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

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 would have to do whatever was necessary to keep them from going down the road,’ says the former Security Minister. ‘Though it was never explicitly stated, it was implicit in the course of action that they were urging upon us that we would have to shoot down our countrymen if necessary!’13

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 Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland. Trimble also entertained the idea of a quid pro quo whereby the nationalist residents would remove their objection to the Orange march if they were allowed the equivalent of a St Patrick’s Day parade. Trimble offered this because he says they knew that the Government wanted the dispute resolved by negotiation rather than by force majeure and that the Major ministry would view their case sympathetically if the Orangemen took the initiative and negotiations then broke down. Major duly endorsed the plan. After the three Unionist leaders emerged from the session with the Prime Minister, Trimble separated himself from the others and announced this initiative which he did not reveal over the table.31 The church leaders’ meeting, which was inconclusive, took place in Armagh the next day: its significance lay in the novelty value of a Unionist chief meeting all of the church leaders together.32

That night, Trimble and the Prime Minister again found themselves under the same roof- this time at the Mandela state banquet in Buckingham Palace. The Queen was ‘most solicitous’ he recalls, but the Duke of Edinburgh pointed at Trimble and teased the UUP leader with the words ‘oh, ho, ho – so they managed to drag you away from the barricades?’; afterwards, Trimble told fellow Loyalists privately that the Sovereign’s consort had a good grasp of the situation at Drumcree.33 Jeffrey Donaldson claims that when Trimble returned the next day, the UUP leader told him, ‘Major will give me a victory’, so long as they went through the motions of conciliation. Trimble says that the state banquet was very conveniently timed, but he denies that Major promised him that the march would go down the road; and Major agrees with Trimble’s recollection that no such pledge was given.34 Whatever really occurred between the Prime Minister and the UUP leader that night, the visit to London did Trimble little good amongst the brethren in the fields outside Portadown. Many of them felt that he had gone to sup with a terrorist, in the person of Mandela; others saw the pictures of Trimble in white tie and tails and felt that he had let down his own people by abandoning his post to enjoy the high life.

The scene when Trimble returned on Wednesday 10 July was about as far removed from the niceties of Buckingham Palace as it was possible to imagine. The Reverend John Pickering, the Rector of Drumcree parish, had been unable to sleep all night and at around 1:45 p.m. was packed off to bed by his wife. According to his private diary, he was still lying down in the late afternoon when he received a telephone call. A huge mechanical digger was moving round at the top of the hill – and metal was being welded on. Pickering informed Trimble, who said there was no such device. ‘You’d better take another look,’ said Pickering. When he saw the digger, Trimble became very concerned.35 Trimble recalls that senior RUC officers were also very worried about the digger – it had been nicknamed ‘police buster’ – and contacted Trimble to see if the UUP leader could do anything about it (there were also rumours that slurry tankers filled with petrol were being readied to spray the RUC). Key players such as Harold Gracey did not know where the digger came from, though Denis Watson believes it must have originated in a local construction firm. Trimble went up to the digger and clambered on to the vehicle, which according to Denis Watson was manned by loyalists in boiler suits. Billy Wright sat there, calmly sunning himself on a deck-chair, whilst the men welded on more armour plating. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ Trimble asked them. They gave him short shrift and one of them denounced him as an MI5 agent. He was rescued by some Orangemen: Denis Watson says that ‘David Trimble is a very lucky man he wasn’t murdered at that stage.’36 Harold Gracey recalled telling Trimble ‘“David, go you out of the way” – and he did.’ Gracey then spoke to the men, whom he said that he had never seen before or since, and they switched off the engine. ‘Okay, we’ll do it for you, but not for him’ (that is, Trimble).37