David Trimble obituary: A man whose willingness to change course helped pave the way for peace

But for David Trimble, who has died aged 77, the powersharing institutions of the Belfast Agreement, shaky as they regularly are, could have been destroyed before they even got going.

Trimble could be difficult, irascible and mercurial, but even his strongest detractors could not deny his resilience, determination, intelligence, and courage, not to mention his strategic political cunning. These attributes kept the engine of the Belfast Agreement ticking over when it could have prematurely spluttered out of puff.

In 1998 SDLP leader John Hume and Trimble were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In a sense Hume was honoured for almost 40 years of work in coaxing the IRA to cease its violence and in providing the blueprint for the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday that year and the subsequent powersharing Northern Executive and Assembly.

Trimble received this highest of accolades for driving his very reluctant and suspicious Ulster Unionist Party – then the dominant unionist force in Northern Ireland – to grudgingly adopt the Belfast Agreement and to run with the new institutions.

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Whereas the late Hume had largely finished his mission Trimble had barely started his: he was facing into yet more brutal test after test to anchor the agreement as part of the new political dispensation of Northern Ireland.

He did this against a powerful rump of his party led by current DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and against Sinn Féin leaders such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and the IRA who could not or would not grant the necessary assurances unionists required to demonstrate that Provisional paramilitarism really was a thing of the past.

His singular achievement was that facing the greatest of odds and the most hostile, unhelpful and obstinate of opponents he doggedly stuck to his task and succeeded in establishing foundations for the democratic politics that now apply in Northern Ireland.

This form of politics is frequently unstable, and occasionally in suspension, as is the case at present, but it is better than what could have been the alternative: another failed powersharing experiment and a possible return to the violence — perhaps of a more muted form — that tortured the people of Northern Ireland for close to 30 years up to the second and generally sustained IRA ceasefire of 1997.

People forget it was a close run thing in nailing down the peace, of embedding the Stormont bodies and of delivering a democratic roadmap away from the threat of violence. That, among other challenges, required the cajoling of a sufficient body of unenthusiastic unionists to at least consider that the new arrangements could perhaps work.

Trimble, by hook and by crook, did that. Without his single-minded leadership the whole Belfast Agreement could have been blown to dust.

Here most of Trimble’s work was done between 1997 and 2002. Helping to achieve the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday April 10th, 1998, was arduous enough but it was the work thereafter that would have destroyed a lesser man.

In the period between 1999 and 2002 Trimble had to battle on a number of fronts, all of them personally debilitating and capable of demolishing the agreement.

On Good Friday 1998 Donaldson walked out of the talks over the absence of IRA decommissioning in the deal. Paramilitary disarmament was mentioned in the text of the agreement but more as an aspiration than a requirement.

Thereafter it became the headline issue of politics, the defining demand of unionism. Donaldson still within the UUP sought to dislodge Trimble with the absence of IRA disarmament at the centre of his argument.

Reserves of wit

This battle was fought through the 860-member Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), the UUP’s unpredictable ruling body that would determine whether Trimble would survive or be ousted as leader. In these internecine years there was a series of do-or-die confrontations in Belfast’s Waterfront conference centre, where Trimble had to employ his reserves of wit, nerve and pluck to keep a majority of the fickle council behind him.

To add to his tribulation at this time, and much to the distress of unionism in general, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was transitioning into the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and republican and loyalist paramilitary killers were walking out free from the Maze Prison as part of the agreement’s early release scheme.

Additionally, the on-ceasefire IRA was centrally in the frame for a number of actions including the July 1999 murder of Charles Bennett.

“No guns, no government”, a phrase that Trimble actually coined, became the clarion cry of the anti-agreement unionists. Trimble also desperately wanted the IRA to give up its weaponry, but he had a sufficient knowledge of Irish history to know that this was almost a doctrinal no-no for republicans. He favoured “sequencing” or a “considered and calibrated approach” to getting the guns out of circulation, but equally he wanted product. But how to bring his party with him and thus save the incipient Stormont structures was the dilemma.

In trying to explain to his party that decommissioning might be a long road, Trimble was daringly innovative. The first Assembly was elected in late June 1998, and a week later Trimble and SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon were elected First Minister and Deputy First Minister. But due to various political rows, chiefly over decommissioning, it wasn’t until December of 1999 that a functioning Northern Executive could be formed.

[ Bertie Ahern: David Trimble’s brave stance on Belfast Agreement is his lasting legacy ]

[ Former Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble has died, aged 77 ]

At the UUP’s annual conference in October of 1999 Trimble invited columnist, commentator, polemicist and former senior Workers Party member Eoghan Harris to address delegates. This was a party which had links to the Official IRA, the organisation that wounded and almost killed one of its most senior members John Taylor. So to say delegates were discombobulated would be an understatement.

Harris was at his most theatrical and forceful. There was a “seismic shift” in republican thinking and unionists should go into government with Sinn Féin without decommissioning, he advised them. Why were unionists so arrogant to think they could do what the RUC, the British army, the Garda, the SAS couldn’t do and disarm the IRA, he thundered. That job should be left to the likes of Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, Gerry Adams and John Hume.

As shell-shocked delegates listened in the conference hall Trimble watched proceedings on the monitor in the press room, chuckling away to himself. Harris told the unionists they effectively had won the war and if they made a “historic accommodation” with republicanism they would secure the union.

“Look, Sinn Féin fought for 30 years,” Harris told them in rich Cork tones. “It’s like a kid wanting a bike for Christmas. The bike they wanted was a united Ireland. They didn’t get the bike. Please, give them a few stickers.”

In the context of the draining battles that had to be fought in the next two years it was clear that unionists were far from convinced by Harris’s arguments but it got them thinking.

Adams frequently chided Trimble for “failing to sell” the Belfast Agreement to his constituency. Trimble, the college educator, said he favoured “seminars over lectures”, sometimes leaving it to the likes of Harris to do the lecturing for him. It was a recurrent criticism of Trimble who believed he knew better what might work with his capricious unionist audience than outsiders did.

It was a genuinely febrile and tempestuous time when London and Dublin had no true idea whether the political centre, so to speak, could hold. A lot of history was riding on how he managed affairs. Trimble was assailed from without his party by the likes of Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson while it was no easier within the UUP with Donaldson leading the anti-agreement bloc against him.

Then-taoiseach Bertie Ahern, British prime minister Tony Blair and US president Bill Clinton sought to assist him while also doing the juggling act of seeking to keep Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and the IRA army council on side.

Clinton was good to Trimble, but the UUP leader did not always reciprocate. When Clinton visited Northern Ireland at the end of his White House tenure in December 2000 to give one last presidential boost to the peace process he spoke at Belfast’s Odyssey Arena with among other dignitaries Trimble and Tony Blair on the stage.

During the speech Trimble kept looking at his watch and at one point went over to Blair to say he must leave for the airport. “You must be joking,” said Blair. But he wasn’t. He quit the Odyssey to catch a flight to London, for an onward trip to Sicily where he was made an honorary citizen of Palermo. Trimble couldn’t quite understand how many people interpreted this as a snub of the US president, even if that wasn’t his intention.

Clinton may not have been as surprised as some people thought at the time.

Over this period Provisional republicans argued that ”the guns are silent” so why not just get on with the politics. But the IRA would not say the “war is over”. It finally did agree to co-operate with Gen John de Chastelain’s decommissioning body, made Jesuitical statements about a commitment to disarmament that needed high-grade lawyers to parse and analyse – and were insufficient for straight-talking unionists to take on board – and also engaged in some minor decommissioning. But it was all frustratingly slow. It did a little but never quite enough to assist Trimble.

Vicious rows

During this time there were some vicious rows between the main protagonists with an under-pressure Trimble at the centre of much of the volatility. The then-northern secretary Peter Mandelson said of one exchange with Trimble, “I’ve never encountered anyone as rude in my life”, although Mandelson always was anxious to assist the UUP leader, his final verdict being that Trimble was a “fighter, not a quitter”.

And this too was true, as proved during those turbulent meetings of the Ulster Unionist Council over late 1999 and into 2002 when anti-agreement unionists effectively sought to kick out Trimble, a step that would have meant the end of the agreement — and when some polling suggested they had the numbers to bring everything crashing down.

By various means, including a four-month suspension of the Assembly from February to May in 2000, Trimble saw off these challenges and kept his party just about with him. The closest the No group got was at the UUC meeting in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in May 2000 when Trimble carried the day by 53 per cent to 47 per cent.

This was quite a victory for Trimble, but there was a jarring conclusion to the day. “As far as democracy is concerned these people ain’t house-trained yet,” he said at the press conference afterwards in reference to Sinn Féin.

“It may take some time before they do become house-trained, and I think we do actually need to see the Assembly running so that the checks and balances that are there eventually bring them to heel. We are dealing with a party that has not got used to democratic procedures.”

Nationalists, even some of those opposed to Sinn Féin, detected an old and gratuitous pejorative unionist trope being replayed here.

But he could be emotionally literate too. In March 1998, shortly before the Belfast Agreement, two friends, Philip Allen and Damien Trainor — one a Protestant, one a Catholic — were murdered by the Loyalist Volunteer Force, a dissident offshoot of the UVF, in Poyntzpass in Co Armagh. The First Minister and Deputy First Minister to-be Seamus Mallon (with whom he had a tricky but abrasively positive relationship) made a potent demonstration of anti-sectarian unity by together visiting the families of the two friends, and illustrating how perhaps there could be real political movement.

“There are a number of people who told me after the event that when they saw that, they realised there was a possibility of things working,” Trimble later told the BBC.

The political arguments at that UUC gathering in May 2000 were made rather incongruously against the backdrop of the elaborate setting for Verdi’s Aida running at the Waterfront. Trimble’s consistent line throughout all the disruptions and attempted putschs, and when the British and Irish governments and all the other interested parties feared the jig was up, was: “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

Trimble, despite the unfortunate and awkward comments and actions, had fought the good political fight with boldness, tenacity and ingenuity, but ultimately it all toppled in October 2002 over a totally separate and unexpected crisis: Stormontgate, the alleged IRA spy-ring operating at Stormont. Even Trimble could not navigate a way out of that jam.

The game was up for a while but Trimble over those fraught and frenzied years had done enough to demonstrate there was still some cryogenic life left in the institutions for later revival.

The Stormont bodies went into cold-storage thereafter for close to five years. The IRA eventually did decommission, but it was done for Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, not for Trimble.

No big reward

He had made all the hard yards but got no big reward. That was in 2005. He was out of power, and the DUP and Sinn Féin were top of the political heap having deposed the UUP and SDLP. Two years later Paisley and Adams did their historic deal to share power.

Through all this upheaval, just as Hume saw the SDLP usurped by Sinn Féin, Trimble witnessed the gradual shrinking of his Ulster Unionist Party to the ambitions of Ian Paisley and the Democrat Unionist Party.

The centre had crumbled although Adams and Paisley moderated party positions to gradually fill part of that ground. Trimble, at least, had the historic sense of himself and of the magnitude of his undertaking and of providing hope for future generations that he was prepared to risk everything, including his party, to bring powersharing as far as he could take it.

Early years

William David Trimble was born on October 15th, 1944, son of William and Ivy Trimble. His paternal grandfather, George David Trimble, who was born in 1874 in Co Longford, joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1895 serving in Sligo, Armagh, Belfast and Co Tyrone before eventually settling in Belfast and attaining the rank of head constable.

With partition, he transferred to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It is not known when the Trimbles first settled in Longford. The family were Presbyterian and lower middle class, far from “Big House” unionism.

According to Dean Godson’s biography, Himself Alone, Trimble got his notorious temper from his grandfather. Once, when relatives came from the then Free State to visit his home they banged on his door shouting “We’ve come to get you Trimble”. The RUC man promptly unholstered his gun and blazed a number of shots through the wooden panels of the door terrifying and scattering his Southern visitors.

Trimble’s father, known as Billy, a civil servant, was also argumentative. He and his wife settled in Bangor in north Down. The young Trimble became David rather than William, avoiding confusion with his father. He never answered to “Dave” or “Davy”, always David. Neither of his parents was in the Orange Order, although his father was a Freemason. His mother saw the loyal orders as vulgar and appeared unhappy when her son joined the institution in 1962.

His relations with his parents were described by Godson as “uneasy”, the rather distant bond with his mother not assisted by a very young Trimble throwing her engagement ring in the fire. Trimble had a number of Catholic friends in Bangor including the future RTÉ presenter, the late Derek Davis. He was academic and a good student at Bangor Grammar school but felt he was not encouraged by senior teachers.

Shy and lacking in confidence neither had he any great expectation of going to university. He was viewed as nervous and highly-strung and a “bit of a loner”. He said his greatest achievement at school was avoiding sport for two years. His primary love was music, an interest that helped sustain him through the worst of times.

He became a devotee of Elvis Presley after hearing All Shook Up in 1957 and later extended his interests to Puccini, Verdi and his favourite, Wagner.

After school he joined the civil service. There he seized the opportunity to take a part-time law degree at Queen’s University, the first member of his family to reach third level education. He achieved an outstanding first, prompting Queen’s to offer him, and for him to accept, an assistant law lectureship post on an annual salary of £1,100.

Self-confidence

From that period he grew in self-confidence, attaining the post of assistant dean of the college’s law faculty. But at a personal level life wasn’t so smooth.

He married Heather McCombe from Donaghadee, Co Down, in 1968. Early in their marriage they suffered the loss of twins when she went into premature labour. They divorced in 1976.

But two years later he married a former student, Daphne Orr. They have two sons and two daughters, Richard, Victoria (Vicky), Sarah and Nicholas, a member of Lisburn and Castlereagh Council, the only one of his children to follow him into Ulster Unionist politics.

It was the proroguing of the Stormont unionist administration by the Tory prime minister Ted Heath in 1972 and the introduction of direct rule from Westminster that brought Trimble into politics. He suspected direct rule was a pathway to British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

He threw in his lot with the rightwing Vanguard movement led by a politician he greatly respected, William Craig. He, Craig, was sacked from cabinet in 1968 by the-then Northern prime minister, Terence O’Neill, after Craig opposed O’Neill making overtures to the Catholic minority population.

With Vanguard, Trimble was fairly centrally involved in the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike of 1974 that brought down the first Sunningdale powersharing Stormont executive. It prompted the later taunt that in finally adopting the powersharing arrangements Trimble was one of the “slow learners” – this based on Seamus Mallon’s famous phrase that 1998 was “Sunningdale for slow learners”.

Regardless, Trimble made no apologies for his involvement with the UWC stoppages that were largely orchestrated by the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, then a legal organisation. ”I am a product of the destruction of Stormont,” he said of 1974.

But Trimble always worked to his own logic. In 1975 he was elected for South Belfast to the Constitutional Convention, essentially a talking shop in the absence of a formal Stormont administration, standing for the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party.

With Craig he proposed powersharing with the SDLP — after helping destroy this arrangement the previous year — but although it stirred debate the move caused divisions within Vanguard itself and was rejected by the other unionist parties. In retrospect it seemed a portent of what Trimble was capable 23 years later.

He joined the Ulster Unionist Party in 1978 after Vanguard folded while continuing with his academic career at Queen’s. In 1990 he was elected MP for Upper Bann.

Through the first half of the 1990s he polished and bolstered his resumed hardline image. With Ian Paisley in 1990 he climbed to the roof of UUP HQ in Glengall Street in central Belfast and waved union flags and shouted anti-republican slogans during a visit to an Institute of Directors gathering in the nearby Europa Hotel by the then-taoiseach Charles Haughey. He deplored the Hume-Adams talks of 1993 that led to the Downing Street Declaration and facilitated the first IRA ceasefire of August 1994.

He accused the-then taoiseach Albert Reynolds of negotiating on behalf of the IRA and offering unionists “surrender by stages”. He also condemned a planned visit to Northern Ireland by then-president Mary Robinson. He warned against any proposals for cross-Border bodies.

One of his biggest moments was in July 1995 when he agitated on behalf of Orangemen at Drumcree seeking to make their return journey along the nationalist Garvaghy Road. Over a disorderly and unstable period — that was to result in further violent annual Drumcree standoffs — he denied a deal was reached so that Orangemen could make that return parade without either the loyal order or Garvaghy Road nationalists losing face. This despite the fact that senior sources involved in those negotiations absolutely insisted such a deal was struck.

Garvaghy Road

He paraded down Garvaghy Road with Ian Paisley and the Orangemen — nationalists standing peacefully on the footpaths, their backs to the marchers — and completed the route close to the town centre with both men enthusiastically walking hand-in-hand together. It was described at the time as a triumphalist “victory jig” by the DUP leader and the local MP. It left a lasting sour impression on nationalists of all stripes.

But it worked to Trimble’s advantage. The following month the UUP leader James Molyneaux resigned. John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney, was overwhelming favourite to succeed him, but to great and widespread astonishment the Ulster Unionist Council elected Trimble by 466 votes to Taylor’s 333. His not-an-inch stance at Drumcree was seen as the deciding factor in his surprise success.

The British and Irish governments had no great initial expectation that here was a politician who might be in a position to support a return to powersharing at Stormont, notwithstanding his contradictory views on the subject during the mid-1970s.

The early years of his leadership, which included a meeting with notorious loyalist leader Billy “King Rat” Wright during Drumcree 1996, strengthened that view. That meeting took place, said Trimble at the time, because “we were very anxious that the (loyalist) paramilitaries would not break their ceasefire”. The first IRA ceasefire had ended at that stage.

But even then he still had the capacity to astound. With the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997 and the second IRA ceasefire the same year the new British prime minister and the taoiseach Bertie Ahern instigated a purposeful attempt to achieve a comprehensive deal to restore Stormont and improve relationships in the North, between the North and the South and between the two islands – the “three sets of relationships”.

Trimble played hard-ball and soft-ball, made demands on decommissioning and other matters, and left the governments wondering would-he, wouldn’t he face Adams and McGuinness across the negotiating table.

Eventually he did lead his party and members of the UVF and UDA-linked parties, the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party, into historic talks with Sinn Féin and the other parties at Castle Buildings, Stormont. The DUP kept away but did take up its two ministerial posts when finally the Executive was formed in December 1999 although refusing to sit with Sinn Féin at cabinet meetings.

The talks led to long days and nights at Castle Buildings and much shuttling by Trimble between Belfast and London. Trimble preferred direct contact with Blair rather than with then-Northern secretary the late Mo Mowlam whom Trimble distrusted. He made no secret about his opinion of the much-loved Labour politician, viewing her as too sympathetic to nationalists and republicans.

While generally dispassionate, like all politicians he had an ego and over this period he savoured the attentions of the likes of US president Bill Clinton, Ahern, and Blair, whom he greatly admired. All this global pleading and massaging was a factor in helping him persevere with what often seemed a hopeless task.

And somehow it all came together on Good Friday 1998. The Belfast Agreement was done and printed. It was a watershed moment in Irish and British history, breaking a link with close to 30 years of violence and offering a new beginning, and Trimble was absolutely pivotal to that huge achievement.

At the time in a line that appeared chiefly directed at the IRA and Sinn Féin he said: “Just because you have a past doesn’t mean you can’t have a future.”

This was a generous comment from a unionist who had lived through 28 years of Troubles violence and who was close on hand when the IRA murdered his friend, UUP colleague and fellow law-lecturer Edgar Graham in the grounds of Queen’s University in 1983.

There were many more rounds of mind-breaking and exhausting work ahead as marked by Donaldson walking away from the deal early that cold Good Friday. Trimble had helped create the Belfast Agreement, but he didn’t have all of his party with him.

In his gut, Trimble must have well understood the toils of Sisyphus. The battle for the impending first minister wasn’t even half won, but again through cussed persistence allied to political skill he ensured that turning-point in history was not lost by a failed retreat to the awful past.

‘A cold house for Catholics’

Trimble deserved the Nobel peace prize he won with Hume. The standout line from his Oslo speech, as written by Eoghan Harris, was that Northern Ireland had been a “cold house for Catholics”. The full quote was, “Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”

But he never quite received the same praise at home as he did internationally. Many nationalists maintained an unforgiving jaundiced view of the man because of Drumcree, because of the angry hot flushes including one furious walkout from a TV interview, because he took the Nobel prize-money while Hume gave his away, because of his occasional rudeness and stilted eccentricity.

Similarly, quite a number of unionists, needing someone to blame, were incapable of seeing the relative stability Trimble helped to cement. They couldn’t quite concede his great achievements, complaining, for instance, that the end of the RUC and the early release of prisoners were too big a sacrifice to pay for the deal – unhappy with the price of peace yet still relieved that generally there were no more bombs or bullets.

But fair-minded unionists and nationalists and others on these islands knew the complex and explosive hazards he had to negotiate — and the uncompromising nature of many of the people he was dealing with — firstly to arrive at the Belfast Agreement and secondly to keep it sufficiently transfused for another four years until Stormontgate, for a period, brought political stasis. In the end it was Paisley and Adams who reaped the benefit of his work.

Trimble remained as UUP leader until 2005 when he lost his Upper Bann seat. He resigned, took up his peerage, adopting the title of Baron Trimble of Lisnagarvey in the County of Antrim. He switched from the UUP to the Conservatives in the House of Lords, a party that always seemed more his natural political home.

Predictably, he was a Leaver in the Brexit debate. In 2009 he supported the ill-fated and ill-named alliance of the UUP and Tories under the brand, UCUNF: Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force.

He enjoyed a contented home life with his wife Daphne. He opposed same-sex marriage but changed his mind when his daughter Vicky told him she was gay. He gave her away when she married her partner Rosalind in Scotland in 2017.

Trimble loved his music and his books. On holidays he and Daphne spent many happy weeks each year on a narrow boat - rather like a small barge - cruising along England’s canals. He had a deadpan way of warning of the dangers of such canal travel. “If you fall in then the first thing that you must do is to stand up.” It may not read humorously, but it was the way he told it.

Trimble loved being out of Northern Ireland, particularly during the most troubled days of unionist feuding. It was his escape valve and may explain his rush to Palermo.

He believed Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and Gerry Adams just could not in their hearts acknowledge that the dominant power they eventually attained largely was achieved on the back of his work, and the Ulster Unionists who stuck with him, and also that of John Hume and the SDLP.

A few years ago he told The Irish Times: “The DUP and Sinn Féin are operating within structures that we and the SDLP created. They may go around saying what great chaps they are, but they are actually living in the world that we built.”

There could never be a meeting of minds with Gerry Adams, but even here there was a certain softening of hostilities, moving from bitter to wry. He enjoyed Daphne recounting how ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize presentation in Oslo in December 1998 the Trimbles were invited to an event at the US National Press Club in Washington that the-then Sinn Féin president also attended.

At the club treats were laid on for the four Trimble children. “Nicholas had gathered up a little supply of M&Ms, and set them at his table,” explained Daphne. “But he then got up to get himself a drink, and came back to find Gerry Adams had pinched his M&Ms.”

He was also conscious of his oddities. In that Irish Times interview he recalled the brouhaha over abandoning President Clinton on the Odyssey stage. He remembered another earlier meeting with Clinton, this time at a marquee event in the White House grounds, also with Gerry Adams in attendance.

The meeting overran but Trimble and Daphne had a restaurant booking. “I was not going to miss my dinner”. But on this occasion Trimble briefed his hosts that he must leave early. Even then Clinton had the measure of the man. He went out of his way to instruct one of his senior aides to escort the Trimbles through the crowd to the exit door, declaring, “He has a very important engagement, he is not walking out . . . He has a very important engagement, he is not walking out . . . He has . . .”