David Trimble: far-sighted but no visionary
At the risk of echoing Mark Antony delivering his assessment of Brutus, let me say at once that David Trimble was an honourable man. The former Unionist leader, Stormont First Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner took a considerable risk when he joined with John Hume, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and Bill Clinton to put together the Good Friday Agreement that brought a kind of peace to Northern Ireland.
Without Trimble, there would have been no agreement and thus, in all likelihood, an extension of The Troubles well into the present century. He deserves the gratitude of the British and Irish people for the part he played in that achievement even if in the judgement of history his fate was to be F W De Klerk to Hume’s Mandela.
Trimble died this week at the age of 77, which came as a surprise to many who didn’t even know he was ill. The tributes that followed, from all sides in Northern Ireland, were no more than his due, even if some of them, most obviously from traditional Republicans, were uttered through gritted teeth.
It should also be said that he accepted his fall from power, outflanked and out-manoeuvred by the Rev Ian Paisley, with a certain measure of good grace. It was galling for him when Paisley — who had rejected the peace agreement as a sham and a betrayal — ended up as First Minster in his place, with, of all people, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the Provisional IRA, as his willing deputy. But he endorsed the new dispensation as a necessary evil and, having given up on elective politics, retired to Westminster to embark on a new career as a Conservative peer.
Trimble’s problem was that though he could see far, he could not see further. His vision of the future was restricted by his essentially unreconstructed Unionism. He thought that the new Stormont Assembly, with its rules-based power-sharing Executive, represented the end of the reform process, not the beginning. He couldn’t see that what he and Hume had established would result not only in the displacement of his own Unionist Party by Paisley’s DUP but in Sinn Fein becoming the province’s biggest, and richest, political party, intent on ramming home a United Ireland.
His last years, divided between London and his family home in County Down, were taken up with speeches in which he continued to argue for the link with Britain and new causes, notably, support for the state of Israel and — unsurprisingly — Brexit, which he believed would not only be beneficial for the UK generally but a cast-iron guarantor of the Union.
David Trimble was affable enough, among friends, but he could also be pompous and vain. His speech accepting the 1998 peace prize, was clever, but uninspired, full of literary and philosophical references that paled next to the obviously heartfelt utterings of his fellow laureate, John Hume.
Perhaps the truest expression of Trimble’s approach to politics is contained in the reference in his Oslo speech to advice by the post-war US ambassador to Moscow, George Kennan, on how best democrats should approach Stalin and his hardline Communist regime.
“Don’t act chummy with them; don’t assume a community of aims with them which does not really exist; don’t make fatuous gestures of goodwill.”
Trimble was never “chummy” with Hume (who responded in kind). Nor did he pretend to have any truck with Irish nationalism or ever extend to Republicans more than a courteous handshake. When he spoke once of Northern Ireland, prior to the Troubles, as a “cold house” for Catholics, he was not suggesting that he light a fire and invite them round for drinks.
His late-life advocacy for the state of Israel was of a piece with his Unionism. Unionists generally support Israel. Loyalists have often flown the Israeli flag alongside the Union flag and the Ulster flag. In the same way, and for much the same reason — ethnic communities, threatened by terrorists, with their backs to the wall — old-school Unionists would regularly speak out in favour of South Africa under Apartheid. Trimble was no old-school Unionist, but he had grown up among them and understood where they were coming from. Though a devoted fan of Elvis Presley — whose life and character were as far removed from his own as is possible to imagine — his preferred classical composer was Wagner.
The young David Trimble was no radical. In the early phase of the Troubles, while still an academic lawyer at Belfast’s Queen’s University, he was an enthusiastic member of Ulster Vanguard, a movement that at its height condoned, indeed encouraged, armed response to IRA violence. Much later, long after he had left office, he defended repeated attempts by the Orange Order to march down the Garvaghy Road, in County Armagh, against the expressed wishes of its Nationalist residents.
Most recently, he stood four-square with the DUP and other Unionist parties in demanding the revocation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, if necessary by unilateral action, as proposed by Liz Truss. The protocol, which avoids the re-establishment of a hard Irish border by creating a customs barrier down the Irish Sea, was dismissed as an affront to the Good Friday Agreement and the thin end of a wedge leading to a United Ireland.
David Trimble will probably be best remembered as a realist — the right man who came along at the right time to work with Hume and others to bring an end to 30 years of violence at whatever cost to himself. He must have known that he would get no thanks from hardline loyalists, and precious little from Republicans. But he went ahead regardless because he could see no other way out of the morass into which his beloved homeland had fallen. In the end, what he offered was a lawyer’s solution to the eternal question afflicting Northern Ireland — how to reconcile the fact of two peoples with conflicting identities co-existing in the same territory. It is to his credit that he gave the still-to-be resolved conundrum his best shot.