When I first met David Trimble in 1979, he was assistant dean of the law faculty. I knew that he had been involved in unionist politics and the Vanguard movement in the very violent mid-1970s. I knew that he was a strong unionist but also a supporter of voluntary coalition with the SDLP. But, at that moment, he was above all an active academic. What struck me about him was his intellectual curiosity. He read the heavyweight cold war journals like Encounter but also was fascinated by the highly original pamphlets produced by the Irish Communist Organisation which bravely challenged the nationalist republican line on Northern Ireland.
Trimble, I should say was nonbinary in his taste. he loved Elvis but classical opera even more. My abiding memory of those days in the early and mid-1980s was of him going for coffee in the senior common room with his brilliant, younger colleague, Edgar Graham, a cool, intellectual Oxford-trained lawyer who was his colleague in the department. Edgar was to be murdered by the IRA by the steps of the university library: not the first Queen’s University Belfast academic to be murdered, as the case of Dr Miriam Daly at her home shows. Trimble was to say that had Edgar been allowed to live he would have become the unionist leader rather than he himself.
Intellectual debate
What struck me most was his intense interest in ideas and intellectual debate. He did not live in an intellectual silo. He read widely but at root there was always the fundamental clarity of his legal training. This intellectual self-confidence is the root of his great success as a politician which led him to the Belfast Agreement and the creation of a much more stable Northern Ireland within the UK. This entity, he believed rightly – and his many unionist opponents did not – would last for decades at a minimum. His sharp legal mind, for example, detected that the formula offered by the Bruton government in the Framework document of the mid-1990s on the territorial claim in the Irish Constitution was inadequate. Trimble negotiated a more radical formula which put the matter to bed. He was always clear in his mind as to the resolution of constitutional issues and, indeed, how they related to previous legislation like the Government of Ireland Act.
His critics within unionism have tacitly accepted over time that he got these big issues right. There is no question also that this issue – above all the consent provision – was of vital and overriding importance to him. His unionist critics would still say that he got the “politics of the gun” wrong. IRA decommissioning was delayed until 2006. Police reform was controversial at the time and regarded by most unionists as disrespectful to a police service which had lost over 300 members to terrorism. Trimble, of course, had no veto in this area as he had, in effect, on constitutional matters though he manoeuvred artfully to bring forward the moment of decommissioning. After all, in the five or six years after the agreement in April, 1998, he established the new underlying constitutional template for Northern Ireland which is still in place. Three thousand and seven hundred people were killed during the Troubles. Trimble played a central role in ending that tragedy.
Explosion of Anglophobia
He was always a strong Eurosceptic. It is no surprise that he supported Brexit. It is a fair criticism to note that he did not anticipate the full destabilising effects of Brexit in Ireland: in particular the explosion of Anglophobia which has assisted the electoral advance of Sinn Féin, albeit more in the South than the North. He did not see the ways in which Ireland had changed politically and economically since his time in top-level leadership.
When Enda Kenny retired as taoiseach, the last of the old Irish political class Trimble had dealt with left the stage. Economically, the weight of the traditional agrarian sector and its overwhelming connection with Britain had changed. A younger leadership group emerged, buoyed up by a renewed phase of Irish economic success in foreign direct investment and supported politically by the EU. The emotional gap between mainstream Ulster unionism and the Dublin chattering classes became wider and wider: the carefully calibrated tone of Bertie Ahern was a thing of the past. Where was Dublin’s traditional concern with stability on the island?
On the other hand, Trimble had good reasons to think that the negotiations of the protocol had not respected the principles of the Belfast Agreement – a point acknowledged in Parliament by his opera-loving friend, Lord Murphy, a key figure as minister of state in 1998 and, later, Tony Blair’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Why was there no respect for Strand 3 (East/West) which he had so carefully negotiated? Why was the central principle of “equality of esteem” for the two communities so radically diluted? Why was North/South discussed in a way which exaggerated the EU dimension while ignoring the centrality of unionist consent? Why were the food safety and animal health provisions of the agreement not reanimated to meet the EU’s legitimate concerns?
In his heyday, David Trimble could rely on respectful attention in the Dublin media – Eoghan Harris and Ruth Dudley Edwards in the lead but there were others who respected his achievement. As Jeffrey Donaldson summons up his courage this autumn, he does so with support in London but, worryingly, rather less in Dublin. A functioning executive would be the best tribute to David Trimble, the decidedly non-woke peace activist.