Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

The retreat to the ivory tower was perhaps a predictable response for a shy academic who felt he needed to be on intellectually secure ground before entering the fray. Curiously, Trimble’s unworldliness contributed in another very different way to his political education. From 1970–2 he lived for the only time in his life in Belfast – at 12 Kansas Avenue, just off the Antrim Road. He had moved into an area from which Protestants were rapidly departing. Nonetheless, he imagined that it was far enough up the Antrim Road and middle-class enough to avoid the clashes between the Catholic residents of the New Lodge and Protestants from the neighbouring Tiger’s Bay. If so, it proved a forlorn hope, for Trimble regularly witnessed many sectarian confrontations at Duncairn Gardens. The experience further convinced him of the inefficacy of the Ulster Unionist establishment’s approach, and that something more had to be done. But through what vehicle? Some of his contemporaries had joined the New Ulster Movement. To Trimble, however, the Alliance party did little to confront the Republican political offensive. Rev. Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionists would certainly have been a possibility for a Unionist who wanted to protest against the alleged weakness of their traditional leadership. But as Trimble saw it, Paisley did too little to save Stormont for his own partisan reasons: if the provincial parliament went, so too would the UUP’s patronage powers and therefore the DUP would be able to compete more equally with the UUP.15 Trimble met Paisley for the first time during the 1973 Assembly elections on a broad loyalist platform. His reaction was mixed: ‘One appreciated the broad earthy humour, and when he’s in a good mood he can be charming. And, obviously, he has considerable gifts of crowd oratory. I would not have been very well disposed to him because of the inconsistencies of his background – his integrationist views and his flirtation with negotiating with Irish nationalism. Then there was the raucousness of his presentation and his purely sectarian approach. I occasionally looked at the Protestant Telegraph [Paisley’s newspaper] and was struck by the crudity of it and that it contained too many vulgar quips from a churchman. And the more I think of it, it’s an accurate reflection of his personality.’16 For the bulk of the intervening three decades, the relationship of the two men would be antagonistic rather than cooperative. Both men are known for not mincing their words at each other.

It seemed to many, including David Trimble, that the abolition of Stormont was a precursor to a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.17 Even Brian Faulkner, whose energy and dynamism Trimble had hitherto admired, seemed to him to have no clue as to how to respond. Only one man appeared to Trimble to have the answers: William Craig, sacked from O’Neill’s cabinet in 1968 for attacking the drift of Stormont’s policy. Craig anticipated that Heath would move against the Unionists and urged that Ulstermen prepare for the coming constitutional crisis. Subsequently, he condemned Faulkner for meekly acceding to the abolition of Stormont – reckoning that Faulkner should have called a Northern Ireland General Election to demonstrate that Heath’s unilateral violation of the 1920 constitutional settlement had no popular support.18 But Craig went further still. Although he was mild-mannered in private and was a flat platform speaker, he nonetheless had a flair for the dramatic pronouncement. ‘I can tell you without boasting that I can mobilise 80,000 men who will not seek a compromise in Ulster,’ he told a meeting of the Monday Club in the House of Commons. ‘Let us put bluff aside. I am prepared to kill and those behind me will have my full support for we shall not surrender.’19

Certainly Craig – like Trimble – vaulted into the national consciousness as a hardline Unionist. But both men were far more complex than they first appeared. Indeed, when each man eventually sought to treat with the representatives of Irish nationalism, their flexibility would amaze supporters and opponents alike. Born in 1924, Craig had been a gunner in RAF Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. After building up successful solicitor’s practices, he had entered the Northern Ireland Parliament for Larne in 1960. During the O’Neill era, he was portrayed (along with Faulkner) as a dynamic, modernising Wunderkind who could accomplish great things for the Province: a meritocratic, almost Wilsonian contrast with the ‘big house’ Unionists who largely ran the Province till 1971. Craig was also an ardent proponent of German-style federalism for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Significantly, Trimble recalls that Craig and he were the only two elected Unionists publicly to support a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 Referendum on the Common Market.20 Moreover, most Ulster Unionists were instinctive Tories who until 1974 took the Conservative whip in the Commons – hence the latter party’s official title of ‘Conservative and Unionist’. By contrast, neither Craig nor Trimble were High Tories in the Enoch Powell mode.

These subtleties were, for the time being, lost in the mêlée. Unionist Ulster felt it was fighting for its life. Only a campaign of mass cross-class mobilisation – of the kind which Loyalists had launched against Home Rule in 1912 – could save the Province from absorption into an all-Ireland Republic. To a young Unionist activist at Queen’s such as David Burnside, it did not then seem improbable that such a feat could be replicated. After all, it had been accomplished within living memory: veterans of the original UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division still regularly walked on Orange marches and there were large numbers of people around with military training from the Second World War.21 Craig’s chosen vehicle for conducting the struggle was the Vanguard Movement, which he launched as a pressure group within the Unionist party on 9 February 1972. Following the precedent of 1912, they produced a Vanguard Covenant. It asserted that the 1920 settlement – which partitioned Ireland into two parts, North and South – could not be undone save with the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. By proroguing Stormont, and introducing an almost colonial system of direct rule from Westminster, Heath had unilaterally abrogated the terms of that bargain. The key test of political authority, the consent of the governed, was now lacking. Craig was accused of denying the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; but he replied that there were political and moral limits to its theoretical power to legislate as it pleased.

Such propositions would have been uncontroversial amongst most Unionists. But where Vanguard differed was that it drew some highly radical conclusions from this state of affairs. Historically, the unique Ulster-British way of life had best been preserved by Union with Great Britain. But what if Ulster was locked into a loveless marriage and her affections were not reciprocated? What if the terms of that marriage could be altered under pressure from Irish nationalists and the IRA – as exemplified by Westminster’s unilateral destruction of Stormont? What, indeed, if Westminster could use its sovereign power within the Union to deliver the Ulstermen ‘bound into the hands of our enemies’? The price of marriage would then have become too high. Thus, for Vanguard, the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If they could not regain an Ulster Parliament on satisfactory terms within the Union, then Vanguard preferred negotiated independence. The arrangements enjoyed by the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man – under the Crown but not in the Union – looked attractive. Vanguard’s enthusiasm for independent dominion status would soon expose them to accusations from some supporters of Faulkner that they were no longer Unionists, but rather had become ‘Ulster nationalists’.22

At the time, Trimble was prepared to give such Vanguardist ideas a fair wind. In an article in the Sunday News on 20 January 1974, he rebutted the views of Desmond Boal, QC, a leading adviser of Paisley. Boal believed that the time for greater integration of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom had passed – but that Ulster independence had never been a runner. Instead, he favoured a federal Ireland Parliament and Provincial Parliament with ‘Stormont’ powers.23 Trimble took particular issue with Boal’s rejection of independence for Northern Ireland. He argued that if one accepted the notion that the British were prepared to pay large sums of money to leave Northern Ireland, then they would surely be just as happy to subsidise an independent Ulster as a united Ireland. He was implying that the coercion of Ulster into a united Ireland was costlier than independence. By contrast, independence might satisfy enough unionists and nationalists to leave behind a relatively stable entity. Intriguingly, he posited the idea that republicans mainly disliked ‘British’ forces, but had an ambiguous attitude towards Protestants (whom he did not describe as ‘British’). Once these ‘British’ forces were gone, and Protestants gave a guarantee that the purpose of such an entity was not to reinforce an anti-Catholic hegemony, all but the most irreconcilable elements of the republican movement might be able to enter into some compact in a new, independent Ulster.

Such ideas must have seemed fairly fanciful as sectarian tensions sharpened. Vanguard held a series of Province-wide rallies, culminating in a great demonstration at Belfast’s Ormeau Park in March 1972: the News Letter estimated the crowd to be 92,000, the RUC put it at 60,000.24Theatricality was an integral part of the Craig roadshow, who would arrive at gatherings with motorcycle outriders. It was widely reported that they were members of a uniformed group called the Vanguard Service Corps – although Trimble, for one, now doubts whether it actually ever existed in any organised sense. Trimble rebuts all allegations by the now deceased loyalist Sam McClure – that he was sworn into VSC at an initiation ceremony at Vanguard headquarters in Hawthornden Road – as ‘utter balls’.25 Some nationalists found Vanguard gatherings fascistic and even Trimble now says he was ‘never terribly comfortable’ at these ‘embarrassing’ occasions. Nonetheless, he attended many such events. He was present at Castle Park, Bangor, in February 1972, where Craig inspected 6,500 men as they stood to attention wearing Vanguard armbands (although Trimble declined to wear one).26 He also turned up for the mass gathering at Stormont, just days after the abolition of the Northern Ireland Parliament had been announced.27

Given the circumstances – both civil war and British withdrawal seemed to be on the cards – Trimble did not consider Craig’s rhetoric to be unjustified. ‘Craig had a tendency to outbursts and to overstate things even before the Troubles,’ recalls Trimble. ‘But he was saying, “Look, there are a lot of people who don’t like the direction of government policy and if pushed they are prepared to fight.” His intention was to make Government in London sit up and think. He certainly succeeded in getting negative publicity!’ Some felt that Craig was unleashing terrible forces in society, but Trimble does not agree: ‘There were lots of things unleashing those forces – the abolition of Stormont, the IRA campaign. If anything, Craig’s rhetoric provided an emotional safety valve.’28 It was more than just rhetoric, though: Vanguard, after all, ‘saw itself as a resistance movement against an undemocratic regime that could be shown to be unworkable when the time came’. To that end, it aimed for ‘the coordination of all loyalist organisations under one banner to save Ulster’. The largest of these was the Ulster Defence Association, then still a legal organisation probably numbering about 40,000 members.29‘Everybody was in it then,’ says Trimble. ‘I was conscious there were criminal types, but they were not dominant. The organisation then was a broad popular response to a near-civil war situation. But what’s happened to the loyalist paramilitaries is that the criminal types have taken over and the broad popular types have gone away’ (indeed, to this day, he thinks that the conventional police wisdom is wrong and that the Ulster Freedom Fighters are not a mere flag of convenience for the UDA, but are a separate organisation). In retrospect, however, he concedes that Craig’s condemnation of Protestant paramilitarism was inadequate.30

Trimble never saw himself as a street activist in this cause; his contribution, he thought, would be as a cerebral backroom boy. In 1972, after his flat in Belfast became too dangerous, he moved back to Bangor and resumed contact with some local Orangemen. It was they who provided him with his first public platform at the Ballygrainey Orange Hall at Six Road Ends, between Bangor and Newtownards. In 1973, the British Government had produced a White Paper, which outlined some possible political structures for the Province. The new Assembly would be elected by proportional representation rather than the traditional first-past-the-post (in fact, there had been PR elections during the early years of Stormont, but these had soon been scrapped, largely to maintain the unity of the UUP).31 No one knew how to operate the Single Transferable Vote system – except, everyone thought, David Trimble. Trimble, in fact, had to go into the Queen’s University library where he found a book on electoral systems by Enid Lakeman.32 His description of how many candidates to run and how to maximise transfers so impressed one of those present, Albert Smith, that he called on Trimble shortly afterwards. Trimble recalls him asking: ‘“Would you like to give another talk?” I said yes, but when? “Tonight!” came the reply. It turned out he wanted me to speak to a North Down Vanguard meeting at Hamilton House, Bangor. I never looked back.’33

There, he met up with a group opposed to the local Faulknerite Unionist establishment. They included George Green, the former County Commandant of the since disbanded ‘B’ Specials, who was by now an independent councillor in the area. More important still to his long-term political development, he also met a Vanguard councillor, Mary O’Fee. Her husband, Stewart, was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, who would telephone Craig and identify himself as ‘the Seaside Voice’. Trimble worried that the ‘tide of history’ was turning against the Unionists, but Stewart O’Fee snorted dismissively and told him to read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, which he found inspirational.34 But O’Fee came to have an even more direct influence: he was the anonymous author of two Vanguard’s best pamphlets, Ulster – A Nation (April 1972) and Community of the British Isles (1973).35 The former, in Trimble’s own words, ‘hurled defiance at our enemies’. It was a trenchant rebuttal of the High Tory case for Ulster’s integration into the United Kingdom along the lines of Scotland and Wales, whose best-known advocate was Enoch Powell. But O’Fee believed this approach contained profound dangers for Ulster. First, the Province would be integrated into the more urbanised, ‘permissive society’ of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ – an unattractive end in itself for a still-religious people. Second, even if it was desirable in principle, integrationists did not possess the means to achieve this: peaceful persuasion would not work since the main British parties did not want it and street protests to attain it would only alienate their fellow citizens with whom they wanted to integrate. Third, Trimble shared O’Fee’s belief that pure integration, without any body which Ulster could call its own to undergird it, contained a political trap. They both believed that integration could only work if the three main parties at Westminster supported the Union. But since many in Labour and the Liberals then appeared to favour the principle of Irish unity, albeit peacefully achieved, as an ultimate outcome, integration would leave Ulster and its tiny twelve-man contingent at the mercy of the 630-strong Commons.

Ulster – A Nation concluded with a ringing appeal for Ulster to redefine her relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom. It posited the idea of a federated British Isles comprising Great Britain, Ulster and Eire, with three separate but equal regions cooperating to promote common prosperity. These ideas were fleshed out in Community of the British Isles which exerted an even greater impact upon Trimble’s thinking. Great Britain would ‘throw off the trammels of the residual sovereignty’ that she exercises as a legacy of her colonial past and thus free herself of any guilt or international embarrassments which that legacy has caused her. More significant still, this would have profound implications for the Roman Catholic minority: ‘The absence of British sovereignty would remove one of the causes of friction and help confront both communities [within Northern Ireland] with the realities of the situation.’ Trimble was impressed both by its emphasis on taking account of the existence of the nationalist community, which would not go away, and by the possibility of creating new structures that could accommodate everyone’s diverse aspirations without surrendering to Irish nationalism. Indeed, the approach outlined in Community of the British Isles would eventually find expression in the British-Irish Council, established under the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

Again, such speculations seemed fanciful at the time. For Unionists were then enmeshed in debating the merits of Heath’s attempt to outline the principles governing new political structures for Ulster. The Government White Paper of March 1973 aimed to provide something for everyone (and was the basis of the Sunningdale agreement of December of that year). For Unionists, it contained the guarantee that Northern Ireland’s overall constitutional status would not be changed save with the consent of the Province’s majority. Also, the bulk of Stormont’s functions would be returned to local control (with the exception of security). But Unionists could only regain their parliament at the price of accepting nationalists in the Government of Northern Ireland for the first time. Nationalists would derive further reassurance from the establishment of an ‘Irish dimension’ – North – South bodies which could someday prove to be vehicles for harmonising the institutions of government on both sides of the border into all-Ireland structures. Faulkner accepted the White Paper and received the endorsement of his party’s supreme body, the Ulster Unionist Council, by 381 to 231.36

Many hardline Unionists had been toying with the idea of creating a new party to oppose the drift of policy, but they had always been deterred from so doing by the feeling that they would have more influence by staying within the existing party structures. The vote to accept the White Paper proposals convinced them that they no longer could prevent such slippage. Craig and his supporters left to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party: the word ‘Progressive’ was included to appeal to the substantial trade union element in Vanguard, led by such men as Billy Hull (formerly of the Loyalist Association of Workers) and Glenn Barr, a shop steward and senior figure in the UDA. Although opposed to the new system, Vanguard nonetheless contested the June 1973 Assembly elections. Trimble was uncertain about whether to stand, but in the end decided to do so. There were several reasons for this. First, he thought if he remained an academic, people would not respect him; he would, therefore, have to ‘get his hands dirty’ in the political arena. But there was another reason, which would continue to motivate him in the coming years. ‘The Loyalist parties were getting a very negative press then,’ he recalls. ‘But I thought “well, it will make the media and the middle classes sit up and think if they find that not all of the Loyalist candidates are ignorant working-class types”.’37 He put his name forward for the Vanguard nomination in North Down and found himself alphabetically on the bottom of the three-man slate headed by George Green. The North Down Vanguard literature had a cartoon of the master (William Whitelaw, first Northern Ireland Secretary) tossing a bone to his lap-dog (Faulkner). And it proclaimed: ‘Vanguard Unionists will not accept a humiliating, powerless, consultative Assembly in place of a proper Parliament … they will not allow murderers and quislings to destroy Ulster and hand it over to Republicans.’

Trimble’s first serious outing on the hustings was, however, disastrous: during the abortive Loyalist strike of February 1973 which Vanguard had supported, a fireman had been killed by Protestant hoodlums. Trimble received a bitter reception in many quarters – ‘it was guilt by association’ he recalls – and came bottom out of eighteen candidates.38 Vanguard took 10.5% of first preference votes for seven seats. Faulkner’s group, with 24 seats, was nominally the largest. In conjunction with other pro-White Paper elements (including the SDLP, Alliance and Northern Ireland Labour parties) the group held 52 seats to 26 for the broad loyalist coalition. The reality, though, was more complex. Some of those who were officially within the Faulknerite camp in fact opposed his policy. The real picture was, therefore, 21 for Faulkner to 27 against him: enough to push policies through with the help of the SDLP and others, but crucially depriving him of a majority and therefore legitimacy within the Unionist community.39

Despite Trimble’s terrible showing, the campaign was not a waste of time. While on the hustings, he met Craig for the first time. Trimble felt an immediate sense of personal as well as ideological kinship: he always was able to anticipate what Craig was thinking. ‘Craig had a penchant for surrounding himself with bright young men,’ says Trimble. ‘David Burnside, Reg Empey and myself have lasted the course. There was a sense with Craig of open-mindedness not associated with the “good old boy” network of Glengall Street. Unlike the others, if he discovered talent he would use it.’40 Many of these Young Unionists had been locked out of Glengall Street – in Empey’s case literally – after the split with Faulkner. Craig also cultivated another young hardline politician, John Taylor, who in the previous year had survived an assassination attempt by the Official IRA; but Taylor never made the leap. Trimble first met Taylor in Bangor in 1973 and liked him instinctively. ‘He was a person who was entitled to respect. After coming within an inch of losing his life, he was still involved and not in any way intimidated.’41

Some felt that Trimble could be a little bit of a ‘boffin’ – but they also deferred to him on that basis. Isobel McCulloch, who was Craig’s secretary, remembers that when Trimble referred to some legal concept by its Latin name, one of the less well-read figures in Vanguard piped up: ‘Say that again, David – this time in English!’42 The whole room, including Trimble, broke up laughing. But for the most part, observes Craig, ‘he fitted in very comfortably. He became accustomed to talking with people. Events brought him out of his shell.’ Craig found Trimble an ideal sounding board for fleshing out his existing ideas: this is significant since many suppose that Craig only extolled the Aland Islands – a semi-autonomous part of Sweden – as a potential model for Ulster because of Trimble’s research. In fact, it was Craig who introduced Trimble to many of these concepts, as Trimble readily acknowledges.43 Trimble was also introduced to the darker side of Loyalism in this period – including Andy Tyrie, the then Supreme Commander of the UDA. Tyrie found that Trimble was quite unlike any of the traditional Unionists of the ‘fur coat brigade’. Not only was he ‘great in committees, great working with people, but he had a quality I would have loved to have had – he was a good listener. Above all, he stayed with the people. Harry West [the Ulster Unionist leader] had no use for us once the crisis that had brought us together was over. David, though, always was available – even when he did not approve of what we were doing. He would say “look, this type of violence is totally counter-productive from your point of view”.’ Tyrie noted with appreciation that unlike most middle-class people, Trimble was prepared to fight, though he claims that he never asked him to join up. ‘I would certainly have been very glad of him,’ Tyrie adds.44 Some time later, Tyrie invited Trimble to attend meetings of the UDA’s Inner Council – an offer which Trimble declined, though he said he would be happy enough to draft papers. He refused because he believed that his talents lay in the realm of politics. When asked if he would have joined up to give the UDA political direction, Trimble replies, ‘wasn’t that what Vanguard was [already] doing?’45 Whatever Vanguard’s relationship to the UDA, there is no doubt that Tyrie trusted Trimble utterly at a political level. But did their closeness to each other make Trimble vulnerable to British state pressure years down the road? Trimble is unequivocal on the subject. ‘There never was an effort by anybody – whether British or anyone else – to make capital out of my associations of the early 1970s. Which is surprising.’46