THE BELFAST AGREEMENT 10 YEARS ON:The nature of Trimble's defeat would invite serious reappraisal in light of the dramatic events to follow, writes Frank Millar
HAROLD WILSON famously defined the eventful, often dangerous, sometimes opportune duration of a long week in political life. Yet how extraordinarily short 10 years can seem in the context of Northern Ireland. Who would have thought that by April 2008 all the principal signatories to the Belfast Agreement bar Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams would be gone, or going? Or that the Rev Ian Paisley would be lauded for his historic role in securing the peace?
There is no known record of the departing Northern Ireland First Minister acknowledging the part played by his predecessor as unionist leader. "Winners write history," as one source close to Paisley put it last May shortly after the DUP entered into powersharing government with Sinn Féin. Yet David Trimble's unique, courageous and enduring contribution can only be properly understood in the context of Paisley's own successful reinvention.
Indeed, it is only as Paisley prepares for retirement that we may fully appreciate that what started out as Trimble's story of challenge and change became a tale of two bitter adversaries who trod a strikingly similar path and would meet not dissimilar ends.
The Belfast Agreement offered Northern Ireland peace and triggered a unionist civil war. In 1998 Trimble gambled everything to secure the agreement, and Paisley subsequently fought him and his Ulster Unionist Party to destruction. Yet it can be argued that the real story of their respective leaderships is one of remarkable continuity. Both men in the end answered to the same imperatives - to end the dangerous estrangement between Northern Ireland and its senior partner in the British Union, and to seek to secure the Union by making the concessions necessary to reconcile the North's growing nationalist and republican minority to the reality of it.
Shortly before talks chairman, former US senator George Mitchell, announced the agreement, then British prime minister Tony Blair slipped a note across the table to Trimble. In his own hand, Blair assured him that he knew what it had taken for Trimble to make the agreement, and promised to do what he could to make sure it worked for the then UUP leader.
Intense debate continues long after his departure from Downing Street as to whether Blair always fully recognised the risks Trimble ran for peace - and if he actually destroyed Trimble and his party by over-indulging a skilful republican leadership that proved adept at the long negotiation as Sinn Féin eclipsed the SDLP and reaped the electoral rewards of peace.
Trimble, however, would have been in no doubt about the lurid and violent denunciation awaiting him from the man who had successfully destroyed all previous unionist leaders tempted to compromise. Paisley famously enjoyed demonising his enemies, and Trimble would soon feel the heat of his magnificent, terrible wrath.
"The worst and most loathsome person in society is the traitor - the Judas, the Iscariot," Paisley told his party conference that year: "Who dares to excuse and whitewash treachery but he who is a party to the treachery?"
In full fiery flow Paisley piled high his contempt: "Who dares to sustain the treachery but he who helped the traitor to bring it about and remains to see the vile deed through, eager to enjoy the pay-off? Of him who professes to be a dedicated ally but who goes over to the enemy because of personal advantages, no words are adequate to describe. He is a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, a knave, a thief, a loathsome reptile which needs to be scotched. I will let the people of Ulster detect for themselves the traitor and pass their own verdict."
In May 2005 the unionist people finally passed the verdict invited by Paisley as the DUP inflicted a devastating general election defeat on the hated Ulster Unionists. Trimble lost his Upper Bann seat, while his shattered party returned just one MP to Westminster. Paisley, with a total of nine MPs, now found himself undisputed unionist champion and leader of the fourth largest party in a House of Commons in which he had once endured Pariah status.
Trimble quit the leadership and went to the House of Lords, making space for his UUP successor by leaving his party and joining the Conservatives. There the Trimble story might have been left, the election results and scale of his rejection the only necessary postscript to his doomed attempt to chart a political path out of conflict for Northern Ireland's divided communities.
Except, of course, that the history making wasn't over and that the nature and import of Trimble's defeat would invite serious reappraisal in light of the dramatic events that were to follow with breathtaking speed. For those who thought they had the measure of Paisley - and not least many who faithfully voted for the DUP leader believing he would "never, never, never" say "yes" - were to be, in one of Paisley's favourite words, confounded.
There would, in fairness, be significant differences - and from the unionist point of view, important advances - in the 2006 St Andrews negotiations, paving the way for what the DUP would claim was its "alternative" to the Belfast Agreement.
However, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern spoke for the rest of the parties when asserting that the alterations to the 1998 accord were "Good Friday compliant". In any event, the internal unionist argument was lost on a wider public watching mesmerised on March 26th, 2007, as television stations around the world broadcast the once unimaginable image of Paisley sitting alongside Adams.
Their encounter was public confirmation of a deal already done. And on May 8th, 2007, Paisley accepted nomination as co-equal First Minister in a new powersharing executive alongside Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. As if to underline that there is little sentiment or lasting gratitude in politics, missing from all official guest lists that day were the original first and deputy first ministers, Trimble and the SDLP's Séamus Mallon, without whose efforts none of it would have come to pass. Nothing, clearly, and no one, could be allowed to rain on "the Big Man's" parade.
Although the temptation must have been sorely felt, Trimble, in fact, had no desire to do so. Rather, he confirmed his own status by saying nothing and making no complaint. There would be debate to come about their competing claims on the history books. What mattered to Trimble in 2007, however, was that Paisley - the once uncompromising leader of "rejectionist" unionism - had been obliged to take the same direction and follow where he had gone before. Courtesy of Trimble's negotiating failures, and those of Blair and Ahern, Paisley was able to make significant advances, crucially forcing the issue of Sinn Féin acceptance of the PSNI as a prerequisite for entry into government.
The damage incurred by Sinn Féin as a result of the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Belfast man Robert McCartney also contributed to more advantageous conditions for Paisley in pressing for the declared end of the IRA's war and the completion of decommissioning.
Yet if Trimble had not embraced the concept of powersharing at Executive level and been willing to absorb the shock of RUC reform, there would have been no accommodation with the SDLP, much less Sinn Féin.
Had it not been for the original Ahern/Trimble engagement leading to the abandonment of the Republic's territorial claim to Northern Ireland, we would never have witnessed Paisley's subsequent eye-watering trip to Dublin. And above all, if Trimble had not been persuaded of the need to provide an alternative political route for republicans seeking a way out of conflict - a decision branded by Paisley as the ultimate in a long line of sell-outs - there may well have been no peace at all.
It's all history now, and most pundits seem agreed the history writers will choose the final winner, the man who held out longest and made the historic shift only when satisfied he could not be outflanked on the right. Yet if that appears a certain bet, there is another: the conclusion will also be that Paisley could not, and would not, have done it without Trimble.
Frank Millar, London Editor of The Irish Times, was named Irish Print Journalist of the Year in 1998 for his coverage of the Belfast Agreement negotiations. The revised and updated second edition of his book, David Trimble: The Price of Peace, is published by The Liffey Press.