Trimble's road to nowhere: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2005/05/08 > Trimble's road to nowhere

Trimble's road to nowhere
Sunday, May 08, 2005 - By Tom McGurk
When the historical archive of David Trimble's political life is assembled, the infamous Drumcree sequence will reemerge in all its irony. It was just a decade ago and there he was sharing the moment of Orange triumphalism with Ian Paisley. Hand in hand, they jigged along before the cheering crowds, having once again forced the march down Garvaghy Road.

Behind them was a Catholic community outraged and bullied into submission by a massive security force presence. Both Trimble and Paisley had instinctively recognised that day how significant for the Orange supremacy ethos Drumcree was, and both were determined to be visibly part of it all.

On reflection now that hand-in-hand triumphant jig with Paisley was a poisonous handshake. In time, Trimble was to pay an enormous political price for his Drumcree fellowship.

Of course, it brought him the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party a few months later. After Drumcree, powered by the Orange Order delegates, Trimble was seen as a safe pair of traditionalist unionist hands.

But from that point on, his political problems began to surface.

The IRA ceasefire and the emerging peace process signalled the beginning of the new politics. Once again, a Unionist leader had to lead his party along unfamiliar paths; slowly but surely, the conflict was drawing to a close and on all sides, compromise and change would be required.

From the outset too, it was obvious that the Drumcree sentiments would have to be abandoned. For Trimble, it was the classic dilemma that all Ulster Unionist Party leaders since Terence O'Neill in the 1960s have had to face.

After 50 years of single-party rule with a unionist oligarchy composed of the big house, the Orange and the Masonic orders, and the overwhelming fact that every election was no more than just a re-run of the old partitionist geography, the constituency for change was tiny.

Within months of O'Neill's arrival, Ian Paisley had moved to the sidelines on ‘Lundy' watch. Paisley quickly became the catalyst against any change, the leader of a traditionalist reaction that in its time was eventually to cannibalise the UUP. As Terence O'Neill was followed by James Chichester-Clark and then Brian Faulkner, each was politically bled dry by the gathering forces of Paisleyism.

In fact, Trimble himself was a member of the Vanguard organisation that organised both political and paramilitary forces against Faulkner. All along, Paisley was suggesting that there was a political alternative and that he alone could hold the fort in the face of the growing accusations of sell-out.

Of course, it was not until last Christmas that Paisley was finally forced to the conference table to unveil his solution. As we now know, it was not terribly unlike the very settlement for which Trimble himself had been so bitterly condemned by Paisley.

Despite all the bluster and the cat-calling, the political reality was that, for any unionist leader, the choices were minimal. With Dublin and London of the one mind and with the 1998 agreement in place, the choice was either to settle on that basis or spend another generation without sharing any political power. Trimble's failure was that he did not understand that maintaining the institutions of the agreement was his best chance of survival. Each time he walked away from power-sharing, he damaged both what he had achieved and its status in the eyes of the public.

Critically, too, what he also failed to understand was that battling outside the institutions was actually Paisley's home territory and Trimble was always bound to lose there.

Imagine the difference it would have made had Trimble faced into this election with five or six years of the power-sharing administration up and running. In these circumstances, he could credibly have contrasted UUP political success and achievement in contrast to DUP anarchy.

But all that is now water under the bridge. Now, Trimble follows O'Neill, Chichester-Clark and Faulkner into unionist limbo.

So in the long run, the spirit of Drumcree was a pyrrhic victory for Trimble. In the end, the forces of traditional unionism that then delivered the leadership of unionism to him have now taken it away again.

His loss also reduces the Ulster Unionist Party to marginal status. Again, despite considerable evidence that the party needed re-structuring and re-organisation, Trimble failed to act.

For some time, David Burnside, who also lost his seat in South Antrim, has been suggesting a unification of the DUP and the UUP.

With leading figures like Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster already moved into the DUP, the UUP may now begin to suffer an even greater haemorrhage.

Certainly, it still has Assembly seats - but come Monday, when the council results come in, the wipe-out factor will become even more evident.

However, the scale of the DUP victory now puts them at the very centre of political expectation. After the euphoria dies down, the realities will settle in. It's been disguised for a long time but it may well now emerge that there are two wings in the DUP: the Paisley one and the Robinson faction.

The Paisley wing will be in the ascendant with this result but, sooner or later, the ambitions of Robinson and company will have to emerge. Indeed, now that the political diversion of the UUP and David Trimble is out of the way, the pressure on the DUP to deliver will be greater.

The political reality that supersedes all of this is that, as Tony Blair has recently pointed out, the Belfast Agreement is the only show in town. How long it takes the DUP to get around this fact is how long it will take to bring the parties back to the table.

Sinn Féin's increased mandate, particularly in the context of Gerry Adams' call for the IRA to step aside, must leave the margin for confusion on their part very small. Importantly, Sinn Féin's mandate is also a mandate for the IRA to step off the stage.

Many commentators have suggested that the two extremes have triumphed on both sides in this election but the other reality is that, for any agreement to survive, it had to include the extremes. Now the North has reduced itself to its political essentials - and no wit faces the ultimate choice.