Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

FOUR Ulster will fight

IN THE autumn of 1973, Trimble became the chairman of the constituency council of North Down Vanguard and was elected Publications Officer at the entire party’s annual general meeting.1 Many in Vanguard – including Trimble – were celebrating the success of the brand-new party in the Assembly elections, but Craig counselled caution. Hardline Unionists had, in fact, suffered a political defeat. Much as Unionists disliked his compromises, Faulkner was still in business. Now that the Assembly was up and running, the stage would be set for the establishment of the second pillar of the new political order as envisaged by the 1973 White Paper for Northern Ireland – a power-sharing executive (the third being the ‘Irish dimension’). The creation of this executive was announced on 22 November 1973, although the wrangling over its composition and size was reminiscent of the disagreements which bedevilled the same exercise some 25 years later. Eventually, it was agreed that Unionists would hold six of the eleven seats, with four for the largely nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party and one for the Alliance. Faulkner became Chief Executive and Gerry Fitt, the leader of the SDLP, became Deputy Chief Executive. Although there was a bi-partisan welcome for this development in Great Britain, loyalists were enraged and vowed to destroy it.

The third and final pillar of the new institutions of government was to be the Council of Ireland. This was a reincarnation of the Council of Ireland provided for in the 1920 Act: it was originally intended that powers gradually be transferred to this body as a prelude to re-unification, albeit under the Crown. It fell into abeyance not because of Unionist intransigence, but because Dublin never nominated any representatives to it (a refusal which suited the Unionists well enough). There was, however, one key difference between the 1920 and 1973–4 settlements: the 1920 Government of Ireland Act notionally envisaged growing harmonisation, through the agency of the Council, between two devolved areas of the United Kingdom. As things turned out, only Northern Ireland accepted the 1920 settlement, whilst the southern part of the island gradually went its own way.2 As Unionists saw it, such a formulation was more disadvantageous in the very different circumstances of the 1970s. For the 1973 Council of Ireland would have combined representatives of a devolved region of the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland) with the representatives of a fully fledged sovereign entity that had severed residual links (namely the Republic of Ireland). Only once this Council had been established would full-scale direct rule be scrapped. However, the security powers would remain a matter for Westminster for the time being.

The British Government hoped that the emerging package would be sufficiently attractive to mollify most Unionists. Under its provisions, the Unionists secured the return of a devolved local parliament, albeit with smaller majorities under the new PR system than they had enjoyed under the first-past-the-post; and they would return to office, but not on the basis of traditional majority rule. Instead, it would be in an enforced cross-community coalition with some of their harsh critics in the SDLP. For nationalists, it was the all-Ireland aspects of the deal which were most important: the gradual transfer of powers to the Council of Ireland was seen by them as possessing the potential, over time, to take Ulster peacefully out of the United Kingdom and into a united Ireland of some kind. After all, they argued, they would be acquiescing in the return of Unionists to the hated Stormont, where nationalists would still be in the minority; and they acknowledged more explicitly than before that Ireland could be re-unified only with the consent of Ulster’s majority. Therefore, in order to keep their constituency happy, the SDLP and the Irish Government felt that they had to obtain a ‘result’ on the Council of Ireland.3 Heath duly summoned the leaders of the power-sharing parties – Faulkner Unionists, Alliance and the SDLP as well as the Irish government – for a conference at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in Berkshire to draw these strands together. The deal struck there contained many of the elements found in the Belfast Agreement of 1998: hence the famous bon mot of Seamus Mallon, now Deputy First Minister, that any subsequent settlement would be ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.4 By this, Mallon meant that the broad outlines for any new arrangements in Northern Ireland were always going to be the same, whether in 1973–4 or in 1998–9. According to this analysis, the hardliners on both sides were too obstinate or confident of securing an unattainable ethnic victory over the other to perceive this essential reality.

But others have invested the phrase with a meaning beyond that given to it by Mallon. Mallon may have implied that David Trimble – a trenchant critic of Sunningdale – was one of the ‘slow learners’. But to pro-Agreement Unionists, it was the two Governments who were themselves slow learners. From a moderate Unionist standpoint, the Governments had asked Faulkner, the leader of the largest party representing the majority community, to bear too much of a political burden: indeed, the then Irish Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald, with John Hume, pushed for a more ambitious version of the Council of Ireland.5 Faulkner called these cross-border arrangements – which, initially at least, comprised tourism and animal health – as ‘necessary nonsense’ that would keep nationalists happy within essentially partitionist structures. But most Unionists perceived them to be an embryonic government for the whole island. Unionists (and, above all, David Trimble) derived the lesson that it was these all-Ireland aspects of the deal – rather than power-sharing with nationalists – which were unacceptable to the mass of Unionists. That is why in the week of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 – when the very ‘Green’ draft settlement was rejected by Unionists – Lord Alderdice of the Alliance party brought a predecessor who served in the Sunningdale Executive, Sir Oliver Napier, to meet Tony Blair. His purpose was to explain to the Prime Minister that Trimble would end up as another Faulkner if the draft agreement was rammed down his throat.6 The ghost of Faulkner thus hangs over much of what Trimble does: indeed, both men rose to the leadership on account of their strong Orange credentials, in Trimble’s case because of Drumcree, in Faulkner’s because he led a disputed Orange march down the Longstone Road in Annalong, Co. Down, in 1955.7

Curiously, Trimble recalls that he felt a degree of sympathy with Faulkner’s dilemma even at the time. David Bleakley, who was the Northern Ireland Labour party’s representative in the 1975–6 Convention, remembers being struck by the fact that Trimble was one of the very few rejectionists in that body who did not lash into the deposed Faulkner.8 Nonetheless, like everyone in Vanguard, Trimble found the overall Sunningdale package unacceptable. The prospects of derailing it, however, seemed at first slender. Shouting abuse at the Faulknerites in the Assembly had not proved noticeably successful. When Trimble heard of the idea of an all-out strike to protest against the new dispensation, he doubted whether it would work, for he recalled the ignominious failure of the earlier protests. In a peculiar way, this was to be a key card in the hands of the loyalist resistance. There had been so many abortive acts of defiance that when the strikes became really serious in May 1974, it came as a surprise to much of the government machine. As ever Vanguard, with its extraordinary mix of town and gown, took the lead in coordinating the resistance of a variety of loyalist organisations to the emerging settlement. Craig brought Trimble to the Portrush conference in December 1973, which was the precursor to the formation of the United Ulster Unionist Council. The UUUC (or ‘Treble UC’ as it came to be known) was to become the umbrella group for all of those Unionists – Vanguard, DUP and anti-Faulkner Ulster Unionists – opposed to the ‘historic compromise’ with nationalism. The aim of the conference was to evolve a single policy statement, for which purpose Trimble was a very suitable choice. He became a leading light in the working party that adopted a federalist blueprint for the constitution of the United Kingdom. Trimble first met both Enoch Powell and James Molyneaux there.9 ‘His was a very clinical kind of approach,’ recalls Molyneaux. ‘He was not at that stage concerned about whose toes he trampled on. And there was the natural tendency of anyone in that age group to have a very strong idea and to take it to the limit – and to shoot down any old fogey.’10 If Trimble was intellectually arrogant, it certainly did him little harm: he spoke in nearly every debate and he remembers Ernie Baird telling him that he was the success of the conference. Later, Craig also asked him to draft the rule book for a new organisation of which little was then known: the Ulster Workers’ Council. At first, it was one of of innumerable organisations of the period, which seemed to arise and then disappear with dizzying regularity – but it would soon acquire great significance. Not that anyone, recalls Trimble, would have needed to consult such a constitution: the exercise was purely to give the organisation a veneer of procedural respectability in the event that anyone had asked. Moreover, it brought Trimble into contact with Harry Murray, a Belfast shipyard shop steward who chaired the UWC and lived in Bangor (and who often gave Trimble lifts into the city).11

The momentum which built up in favour of the UUUC’s rejection of Sunningdale was not confined to the working classes. It was more broadly based, and as during the first two ‘sieges of Drumcree’ in 1995 and 1996 implied at least a level of middle-class Unionist acquiescence in street protest. The source of this discontent was quite simple: the deal did not seem to be delivering what it promised to do. The first major blow came after the Executive had taken office on 1 January 1974. The Ulster Unionist Council – where Faulkner’s margins had been thinning ever since he accepted the White Paper in May 1973 – rejected Sunningdale by 427 votes to 374. The motion was proposed by John Taylor and was seconded by Martin Smyth. Faulkner promptly resigned as party leader, and although he took the Executive members and others with him, he was now completely detached from the bulk of the party machine.12 Shortly thereafter, a former Fianna Fail Cabinet minister, Kevin Boland, launched a High Court challenge to the Irish Government’s recognition of Northern Ireland’s present constitutional status. He claimed that it conflicted with Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s 1937 Constitution. When the Government mounted its defence, it emerged that they were arguing that they had not after all acknowledged that Northern Ireland was outside the jurisdiction.13 The consent principle, so crucial to Unionists, was fatally undermined by a clever legal formulation. The effects on Faulkner were more devastating still: so much so that when the United Kingdom General Election for Westminster was held on 28 February, the UUUC defeated every sitting Unionist candidate who was loyal to Faulkner and won eleven out of the twelve Ulster constituencies. Their slogan was, ‘Dublin is only a Sunningdale away’.14

The February 1974 election was the closest thing there would be to a referendum on Sunningdale, and for the first time rejectionists could claim to have a popular mandate. Labour were back in power, and Harold Wilson, whose personal sympathies were in favour of Irish unity, was once again Prime Minister.15 Meanwhile, the IRA stepped up the tempo of its activities: the murder of a UDR soldier, Eva Martin, at Clogher, Co. Tyrone, evoked particular horror. The killer was Sean O’Callaghan, who later became the highest ranking ever defector from the Provisional IRA and who would come to know Trimble well – and advise him – following his release from jail in 1996.16 In this fevered atmosphere, the UWC demanded fresh Assembly elections. The UWC had been preparing assiduously behind the scenes and were especially well organised amongst the crucial power workers. Accordingly, when the Assembly rejected a motion denouncing power-sharing on 14 May 1974, by 44 to 28, Harry Murray promptly announced that the loyalists would reduce electricity output from 700 to 400 megawatts. The next day, in response to a general strike call from the UWC, workers downed tools at the Harland and Wolff shipyard; road blocks started to appear everywhere.

The organisational skills of the loyalists were impressive then. The strike was run from Vanguard headquarters at 9 Hawthornden Road, in east Belfast, by the UDA spokesman and Vanguard Assembly member Glenn Barr, with a fifteen-strong committee that included representatives of all the main political parties. Also on that committee along with the politicians and trade unionists were Andy Tyrie of the UDA, Ken Gibson of the UVF, and Lt Col. Brush of Down Orange Welfare. As well as power cuts, the strike committee started a system of issuing ‘passes’, so that workers in essential services could buy petrol: anyone who wanted to move about had to apply to the strike headquarters. Initially, the politicians were told to stay away for the duration of the strike – and it suited them perfectly. For although the idea of the strike, according to Trimble, had originally come from Vanguard, they did not want it to be thought to be theirs alone or even originating primarily with them.17 The focus of attention soon moved even further away from conventional politics and street protest: on 17 May, the UVF bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing 33 people. It was the heaviest day of casualties during the entire Troubles. ‘I was very surprised,’ says Trimble. ‘The whole object of the strike was that it was non-violent action. The perceived wisdom was that it was mid-Ulster UVF. I could never see the logic of sectarian attacks. This is one of the worrying things about loyalist paramilitarism, its absence of intelligence in both senses of the word.’18 Trimble was present at Hawthornden Road on the evening that the Dublin-Monaghan bombs went off: despite Craig’s instruction to key Vanguard figures to stay away so that the grassroots elements could appear to run the show, he could not stay away from the scene of the action for very long.19

After acting as telephone operator, Trimble graduated to printing very amateurish passes on a children’s Letraset, which those who applied to the UWC could show at road blocks to go and buy fuel. Eventually, he produced the daily strike bulletin with Sammy Smyth of the UDA.20 Smyth was a figure given to very extreme pronouncements: the Irish Times reported him as saying that ‘I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State and now we are laughing at them.’ For these, remarks, Smyth was ‘disciplined’ by the UDA – that is, beaten up – and was removed as a spokesman; he was murdered by the IRA in 1976.21 (Curiously, until I raised the matter with him, Trimble states that he was unaware of Smyth’s views, since he rarely read the newspapers in those fevered days). Indeed, at one point, Trimble was embarrassed when a professor at Queen’s turned up at Hawthornden Road wondering how examinations would be run with petrol so severely rationed. ‘Oh, Trimble knows all about that,’ replied the trade unionist. The two university colleagues then had a strained conversation. For the most part, though, Trimble – who at the time stayed at his mother’s house in Kilcooley – remembers ‘an almost blitz spirit’. Local farmers, for instance, gave milk away rather than throw it out because they could not sell it. The sense of solidarity was reinforced by the knowledge that they were being listened to by the security forces. Trimble remembers watching a British soldier crawling along the ground trying to install a microphone at Hawthornden Road: he laughed loudly when George Green simply placed a radio near the device and switched it on, drowning out the loyalists’ words. Trimble suspected that his mother’s telephone was tapped, and his concerns were vindicated when she returned from holiday and was surprised to find that the line had been broken, which tended to occur when the primitive devices of the period were disconnected: Trimble, though, never sought to venture an explanation to her for this inconvenience!22 In fact, says one senior security source of the era, the technology even then was such that a breakdown of Ivy Trimble’s telephone could not have been caused by the removal of the tap. But the source confirms that Trimble’s telephone, along with many others, was monitored in this period.23

In these heady days for loyalists, Trimble was hugely animated. Herb Wallace, his closest colleague at Queen’s, remembers that he was ‘terribly excited to be associated with the leading lights on the UWC. Glenn Barr even told him that when he became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Trimble would be Minister of Law Reform.’24 On the morning that the Prime Minister was to make a broadcast to the nation about the growing crisis, Trimble attended a key meeting of the strike coordinating committee. Present were Craig, Paisley, West and the workers’ representatives. They had just received a draft of Wilson’s address condemning the strikers in even harsher language than the Prime Minister eventually employed. Trimble, like everyone else, thought that if he went ahead with that version, there would be an explosion of uncontrollable violence. ‘I reckoned: “This is madness. This will destroy the country and double the death toll overnight.”’25 Word also came through back-channels that as they watched the broadcast that night, the UWC would be swooped on by the Army. Accordingly, the UWC high command went to ground and left the elected politicians behind: the Army would then find they had bagged a bunch of parliamentarians, plus the Assistant Dean of the Law Faculty at Queen’s University. But before they departed, the UWC did have one serious discussion about the legal aspects of a possible declaration of martial law. Trimble had brought along a copy of R.F.V. Heuston’s Essays in Constitutional Law, which had an excellent treatment of the subject. The strike leaders were obviously sufficiently impressed by Trimble’s exposition to borrow his copy of Heuston. It was not returned – and the Army never came anyhow.26

Wilson, in the end, diluted his speech, but it nonetheless turned out to be his best-known pronouncement ever on Ulster, in which he attacked the loyalists for ‘sponging’ on Westminster.27 The strikers promptly began to wear little sponges on their lapels, and the effect of Wilson’s speech was, Trimble recalls, to send the already high levels of support for the loyalists through the roof.28 Despite Wilson’s own resentment of the strikers, neither the Northern Ireland Office nor the Army wished to confront them: why risk bloodshed, they reasoned, for the sake of a doomed executive? Faulkner, faced with a complete end to electricity supplies, more unburied dead, and untreated sewage bowed to the inevitable and resigned with the executive on 28 May 1974. The Council of Ireland died with it and Merlyn Rees, the Ulster Secretary, resumed full-scale direct rule from London. Thereupon, the raison d’être of the strike vanished: those who wanted to press on and secure the return of the old Stormont were left isolated. Unionists had shown that they could veto unwelcome developments, but they had neither the strength nor the cohesion to reimpose Stormont.

Trimble, though not a figure of the first rank in the strike, had impressed many of those around him by taking his stand. ‘It could have ruined his career in law – but he stood up and was counted,’ says Andy Tyrie. ‘David Trimble, David Burnside and Bill Craig were prepared to suffer the consequences. It could have been a failure. There were no MPs there. They all ran and hid over the law-breaking. All those generals and captains in the Orange Order left and did not want to be seen as bigots and thugs. But the David Trimble of today is the product of 1974. Nineteen seventy-four was the first time that ordinary people started to question how the Unionist family operated. In 1974, no Unionist politician of any prominence took part in the strike.’29 (Paisley had been in Canada at the funeral of a friend when the strike broke out and some paramilitaries used this to undermine him, suggesting that he had only returned when it seemed to be gaining ground.) In the euphoria which obtained after the UWC strike, it was decided that the organisation needed to have a policy. Craig, therefore, ‘loaned’ Trimble to the UWC – in a bid to hold back some of the wilder ideas which would emerge from some individuals at ‘brain-storming’ sessions.30 Eventually, the UDA went off in their own direction and in 1975 produced a document in favour of Ulster independence; and whilst Vanguard was the largest of the Unionist movements with an affinity for such ideas, neither Craig nor Trimble plumped for that logical extreme. Indeed, both men would soon astonish the political world with their boldness, but of a very different kind.

FIVE The changing of the Vanguard

TRIMBLE had earned his spurs during the UWC strike and its aftermath, but he was not yet a figure of any public note. All of this was soon to change as a result of the British Government’s new set of proposals – one of many ‘initiatives’ that punctuated the Troubles. The White Paper, published in July 1974, set out a scheme for an elected Constitutional Convention. The job of this body was to consider ‘what provision for the government of Northern Ireland is likely to command the most widespread acceptance throughout the community there?’ The Convention was to be composed of 78 members elected by PR on the same basis as the 1973 Assembly, under the chairmanship of the then Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Sir Robert Lowry.1 At first, though, Trimble thought he would not be a candidate. His marriage had broken up and he duly decided to withdraw himself from consideration in North Down (divorce was then much rarer in Northern Ireland than it has since become). George Green would anyhow head the Vanguard list on his home turf, making it unlikely that Trimble could win even if selected. But Craig had counted upon Trimble to be at his side in the Convention and persuaded him to put forward his name for the nomination for South Belfast, where Queen’s University was located. Trimble had two rivals: Raymond Jordan (election agent for the local Westminster MP, Rev. Robert Bradford) and David Burnside. Jordan was assured of a slot, so the contest boiled down to a fight between Trimble and Burnside.2 Trimble won out, but that did not prevent them from working together as the twin pillars of Craig’s operation, with Trimble as the policy brains, Burnside as the press officer. Both men shared a common objective: to modernise Unionism. As early as 1976, Burnside favoured breaking the formal link between the Orange Order and the UUP, which is reminiscent of the trade unions’ links to Labour. It was a relationship which would endure with many ups, and more downs, over the next quarter-century – by which time Burnside had become a prominent London PR executive whose premises served as home to the Unionist Information Office, and from 2001 as Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim.3

Trimble’s election literature showed a bookish Buddy Holly look-alike posing in a law library, and proclaimed the traditional Vanguard message of the necessity to restore effective devolved government. But it also contained a teasing hint of flexibility – and one which was to prove significant and bitterly controversial later. ‘An effective local Parliament must have an executive which conforms with democratic principles (which includes the possiblity of coalitions freely entered into),’ he declared. ‘The executive cannot be formed on a sectarian basis or with places guaranteed to certain groups irrespective of the outcome of an election.’ In other words, whilst rejecting compulsory power-sharing with a guaranteed place for the minority population no matter what happened, Trimble was prepared to look at another kind of arrangement with the SDLP. This codicil neither distressed nor enthused the electorate: to them, it was the sixth poll in just over two years. Trimble, initially, found it hard going on the hustings. ‘I don’t think that he actually liked the process of asking little old ladies for their votes – and I’m not sure he does today,’ recalls Reg Empey, who was then chairman of Vanguard. ‘I got the impression that he saw the election as the only way into the political process but he was uncomfortable talking about rising damp and other problems.’4 But more important still was the way in which Craig chose to use Trimble in the Convention election. He fixed things so that Trimble would be given maximum coverage, picking him as the party’s representative in a Province-wide TV debate. He certainly needed the experience. ’I showed John Taylor my scripted contribution beforehand,’ recalls Trimble. ‘It went “now let us dispose of some canards”. Taylor, though, just mocked me. “Nobody will understand what that means,” he said. And he was right.’ On the next day, back on the doorstep in South Belfast, the atmosphere had changed: Trimble was now a personality in his own right and was treated as such. Trimble also stood in for Craig in a second broadcast after the Vanguard leader was taken ill, and thus appeared in two out of three of the party’s election broadcasts. This exposure did much to explain how Trimble was elected over Raymond Jordan, notwithstanding the fact that he came lower down the ballot paper alphabetically and had been less well known locally than his colleague.5 Trimble secured 2429 first preferences (Martin Smyth of the UUP topped the poll with 15,061 votes) and following the distribution of transfers was elected on the ninth count with 7240 ballots cast.6 Trimble was the fifth of the six representatives for the seat and duly became a member of the Convention on a salary of £2500 per annum.