`So Be It." So said the then-Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, in September 1993 in reply to a question about the possibility of talks without the DUP. It is now three months since the DUP and UKUP withdrew, and the multiparty talks are proceeding with only 57 per cent of the unionist population represented.

It would appear that the talks must only be inclusive so long as republicans are in situ.

The leak of Department of Foreign Affairs papers to the Sunday Independent, which apparently deal with the Anglo-Irish InterGovernmental Conference of January 28th, 1994, has given rise to additional chariness, and David Andrews's probably overblown comments as to their potentially explosive character have increased unionist misgivings.

Only the publication of the papers will now ease the situation, even at the risk of their contents not being interpreted contextually. After all, Irish Government policy at the time was still clouded by Dick Spring's interview with the Guardian in July 1993 when he suggested that the Northern Ireland parties might have to be by-passed.

Accurate assessments suggest that the unionist community is probably split fairly evenly on the question of the talks. Opposition to participation has three basic foundations, and David Trimble must deal in his speech with each of the loci of discontent comprehensively.

One strand morally objects to the notion of a talks process involving Sinn Fein while that party remains part of the republican movement, which traditionally takes its cue from militarism.

While the intelligence assessment that the IRA is still engaged in target surveillance has strengthened the hand of this section of opinion, the UUP leader can wholeheartedly agree morally. But, pointing out that he did not invite Sinn Fein, and that the UUP is not negotiating directly with Sinn Fein, he is bound also to stress the likely international sideeffects of withdrawal at this point.

Another slice of unionism, believing that a "pan-nationalist front" operates, argues that the Irish Government and the SDLP seek to award Sinn Fein a de-facto veto which it does not possess on the basis of its vote under the rule of sufficient consensus.

Sceptical about the prospects of an SDLP-UUP accord, the proponents of this view are convinced that an unbridgeable gap exists between the UUP and Sinn Fein and that the talks are "not worth the candle" in such a circumstance.

Here David Trimble can recall the launch of substantive talks when Sinn Fein was isolated from the SDLP and the Irish Government while, at the same time, concurring that, if such a veto operates in the future, the talks will fail in their present format, since no conceivable whittling down of positions will create broad common ground between republicanism and unionism.

The third position, as propounded by Robert McCartney MP, is that, as he said last week in Carryduff: "The political goal of the present [British] government is disengagement from Northern Ireland. It has so stated in its own documents of policy."

The UKUP leader, a former UUP assemblyman and now the intellectual prosecutor of the antitalks axis, has some residual hold over the affections of ostensibly Ulster Unionist supporters.

This argument - that the process is constructed in such a way as to allow for only one possible outcome, the diminution and potential end of the Union - is most problematic for David Trimble. That the British government seeks disengagement from Northern Ireland will come as no surprise to any unionist.

Disengagement, however, takes two forms: withdrawal ("Brits out"), and the insulation of the body politic at Westminster from what is seen as the sectarian brawl in the North.

McCartney regularly misquotes the line from the Downing Street Declaration about the British government having "no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland". The absence of a comma between "selfish" and `strategic' in the phrase utterly alters its meaning.

The British government's interest in Northern Ireland is largely a democratic one: it cannot withdraw because most of the people in the defined area do not wish to leave the Union.

McCartney and Conor Cruise O'Brien also bizarrely seem to place more emphasis on a decadeold Labour document called Towards a United Ireland than the Prime Minister's speech this May about "valuing the Union".

Unionist pessimism sometimes borders on neurosis: that nothing can be achieved inside or outside the talks.

Appearing to enter new political territory while seeming to shift from old certainties, particularly decommissioning - even if that was a test of republican sincerity invented by the British and Irish governments and not unionism - has confused the UUP grassroots. However, there is a feeling that the destructive power of the July marches cannot consume all unionism's energies.

David Trimble will have to emphasise what is achievable, such as the continuation of the Union, the removal of the Irish constitutional claim, the replacement of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the return of a measure of local accountability.

These objectives are contingent on an internal arrangement which involves genuine partnership and an engagement with the theology of cross-Borderism while still enjoying his party's trust.

That is a circle which can be squared.

Stephen King is special adviser to John Taylor MP, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party