On March 15th, 1996, David Trimble became the first Ulster Unionist leader to attend a St Patrick’s Day party in the White House. It was unfamiliar territory for the Upper Bann MP. The ballroom was packed with Irish-Americans; guests were offered boxty, Kerry pies and green beer sherbet, and John Hume and Phil Coulter sang The Town I Love so Well.
The visit had started badly. Trimble was confronted on arrival in the US with a New York Times advertisement, inserted by an Irish-American lobby group, comparing him to David Duke, a former leader of the Klux Klan.
White House officials and most Irish-Americans treated Trimble with great courtesy but, suspicious of their motives, they were exposed to his prickly side. He furiously berated Niall O’Dowd for smoothing the way for Gerry Adams to get to the White House. Journalists too felt his wrath. He once snapped angrily at me at a DC press conference about the editorial writers in The Irish Times “telling lies” about him.
Trimble did not want to play the nationalist game by getting drawn into a Washington-brokered process. This would only mean making concessions. Nevertheless he had to engage. President Bill Clinton had defied the UK government to make big concessions to Sinn Féin to encourage the IRA to take the democratic route. No longer could unionists rely of the British embassy to protest their interests.
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However, it soon became obvious to American officials that there could be no peace in Northern Ireland without the involvement of Trimble’s party. Shortly after that St Patrick’s Day party, the unionist leader received a formal invitation to the White House. There he encountered Mairéad Keane of Sinn Féin in one corridor and John Hume in another, clear evidence that he too needed to be there putting the unionist case.
Unionist revolt
White House officials complained that Trimble had to be pushed and pulled every step of the process and that he never made initiatives, though in later years he would be praised warmly by Clinton for his courage in getting his party to support the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
During negotiations in Belfast leading to the agreement, Clinton made several late-night telephone calls to Trimble and others to help broker disputes. One critical call to Trimble helped him to see off a unionist revolt over the delay in decommissioning IRA weapons.
At the annual St Patrick’s Day party in 1999 to celebrate the agreement, Clinton arranged for Trimble to meet Adams in a private White House room to hammer out some issues.
The US president continued to offer his services to Trimble as he struggled with upheaval in unionist ranks. In one call Clinton acknowledged to him that “most of your people think I have been too close to them [Sinn Féin]”.
After congratulating Trimble on getting the Ulster Unionist Party to again accept unpopular proposals, Clinton told him “You were brilliant”, according to White House telephone transcripts released in 2017. “They may have to give you a second Nobel Prize.”
Trimble retorted that he needed Gerry Adams “to divvy up a bit”, and Clinton told him, “I will get on to it.”
The US president also promised Trimble that “you guys can wake me up in the middle of the night if you think of anything I can do or say that will either help you with your own people”.
After that call, Clinton telephoned Gerry Adams and told him: “I hated to see Trimble have to go back to all his crazies, but it came out okay.”
Old friend
Many unionists suspected Trimble was at times taken in by a president noted for his powers of flattery, persuasion and arm-twisting, and who they always suspected was pro-nationalist. On the eve of Clinton’s second visit to Northern Ireland in December 2000, Sammy Wilson of the DUP called him a “draft-dodging, IRA-loving pest”.
However, Trimble welcomed the outgoing president to Belfast as “my old friend”, who had marked a turning point in achieving peace on his first visit in 1995 by telling paramilitaries: “You are the past. Your day is over.”
Trimble would subsequently claim that part of the reason the Clinton administration became more even-handed on Northern Ireland was due to his advocacy and to the White House “coming in contact with reality”.
There was another side to Trimble that manifested itself more freely when on the other side of the Atlantic. Seamus Mallon told me that when he and Trimble were deputy and first minister of the Stormont administration and were on trips to American cities promoting investment, they would have dinner together after a hard day’s lobbying.
“We both enjoyed a good red wine, and after a few glasses, he shed his public persona and was great company,” said Mallon, who had many public spats with Trimble. “In fact, he could be great fun.”
Conor O’Clery is a former Washington correspondent of The Irish Times