Politics: A biography of David Trimble provides a most comprehensive account of the peace process. Martin Mansergh reviews Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism
Travelling back from one of the innumerable bilateral meetings designed to achieve implementation of the Belfast Agreement, a long-standing member of the Irish negotiating team asked: "Who is going to write the history of all this?" Dean Godson has, for now at least, stepped into the breach. Contained in a severely pruned biography of 841 pages of text, excluding notes, which requires concentration at multiple sittings, is by far the most comprehensive, account of the peace process, from Trimble's election as leader in September, 1995. For those, who have lost count of the assembly suspensions, and for whom individual episodes in the hard grind of tight and complex negotiation have become blurred with time, Godson's book will be an invaluable aid to recall.
While the focus is on Trimble, other viewpoints, within unionism and without, are canvassed. It is a critically sympathetic biography, not hagiography. The research is extraordinarily thorough, and will provide in due course a contemporary source to be checked against documentary evidence, released later.
David Trimble is not someone who makes life easy for his admirers. He is the only political leader to have admitted to being more comfortable with concepts than with people, and his networking skills are depicted as below par.
Yet his feats of survival exceed those of Charles Haughey, even if some internal critics now consider him a political corpse. If there is any validity in Swift's adage, that the Irish are a very fair-minded people who never speak well of each other, then no party is more Irish than the Ulster Unionist Party! Trimble's positive contribution and achievements have been underrated and often denigrated by nationalist Ireland, perhaps because we wanted him to be someone else (e.g. an Irish de Klerk). The Southern African comparisons are not entirely without merit, however, as the young Trimble was "passionately interested in Rhodesian UDI".
Yet he deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. He has brought Ulster unionism a huge distance from the skilful but not indefinitely sustainable inertia of James Molyneaux's leadership. He has laid the basis for new structures to underpin peace, and pioneered a new dispensation in Northern Ireland. He was surprisingly understanding of republican constraints.
Godson is right to be agnostic in his conclusions about whether moderate unionism has succeeded in stabilising the Union and about Trimble's hopes of turning nationalists and republicans into "structural unionists". The British-Irish Council in Strand Three, to which he attached great importance, became largely a spare wheel, when the British government decided that joint ministerial conferences would be the vehicle for co-ordinating devolved parts of the UK.
The first 150 pages deal with his background. The paternal line were tenants on the Edgeworth estate in Co Longford, from at least the late 18th century. His strong-armed grandfather moved from the RIC in Belfast, where he signed the Covenant, to the RUC in 1922.
There are other surprises. David Trimble honeymooned with his first wife in Bray, Co Wicklow; his second wife Daphne's sister married a nephew of Frank Aiken.
As a moderately successful academic lawyer, he was an expert on the rented sector. Interestingly, he was much influenced by the British and Irish Communist Organisation and their two-nations theory. His preferred definition of unionist identity, the Ulster-British, never really gained currency, and has been somewhat superseded by Ulster-Scots mentioned in the Agreement.
He joined Vanguard, and for much of his career came across as hardline. He demonstrated with Ian Paisley on top of the Europa Hotel in Belfast, when Charles Haughey came to address the Institute of Directors as EU President in 1990.
His Calvin Macnee column in Fortnight was more analytical. As a leading light of the Ulster Society, he wrote interesting and historically informed pamphlets on the foundations of Northern Ireland and the Easter Rising. He concluded that General Maxwell should have been allowed to execute a lot more rebels! More fond of grand opera than loyalist band music, it was his association with the triumphalist conclusion to the Orange march down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown in 1995 that made him leader. It also left him with uncomfortable baggage. The part of unionism that alienates sympathisers in Great Britain, many of them Catholic, is the manner in which the Orange Order in certain instances goes out of its way to look for trouble, breeding viciousness. That trouble deters investment, pointed out again by the departing US Consul-General in Belfast. It alienates many middle-class unionist voters, and Protestants throughout Ireland, who hate to see their good name and tradition muddied by sectarianism. That is not even to mention its effect on the principal target to be impressed, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. Trimble did not follow through his intention of severing the umbilical cord between the UUP and the Orange Order, though it now seems as if the Orange Order could return that compliment. None of this inhibited Steven King, former adviser to John Taylor, from irresponsibly inserting an aberrant passage into a speech, issued in Trimble's name in March, 2002, attacking the Republic as a "pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural state", to which I was asked to reply.
Trimble's great success was to open up lines of communication all round, and to enter into negotiation with all parties and heads of government - Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, and US presidents Clinton and Bush. He much preferred the viceregal Sir Patrick Mayhew to Mo Mowlam's alleged lack of dignity and ignorance of boundaries. He likes the company of nationalist "apostates", and was not above using English-based enthusiasts as "running dogs", while preparing an accommodation. The Daily Telegraph, of which Dean Godson was deputy editor, was probably one of them, and more than once was left high and dry, as Trimble moved on. His future and that of his party partly depends on whether the DUP can do business with Sinn Féin on defensible terms.
Martin Mansergh is a Fianna Fáil Senator and an Irish Times columnist