Unionist
Politics
by Feargal Cochrane
Cork University Press 2001
However, succour existed for pro-Agreement unionists in the logic provided
by George Mitchell when he announced the outcome of his review on 18 November.
Turning his attention to the decommissioning issue, Mitchell declared: There
has been a lot of talk about guarantees. There is one guarantee. It is that
if this process fails there will be no chance whatsoever for any decommissioning.
If I may use a phrase I had not even heard of until I came to Northern Ireland:
even the dogs in the street know there will be no decommissioning, no possibility
of decommissioning, if Mr. Trimble is rejected and if this process fails.
43 Unfortunately for David Trimble, George Mitchell did not have a vote
in the impending meeting of the UUC. A pivotal role was now held by UUP
deputy leader John Taylor, who had hardened his position against the Mitchell
Review in the weeks preceding the UUP vote. Taylor's political mood during
the peace process seemed to be as changeable as the Irish weather, and few
observers were surprised when unionism's 'maverick's maverick' eventually
announced his support for the new sequencing policy being put to the UUC
meeting. One of the delegates at the meeting in Belfast's Waterfront Hall
on 27 November provided a metaphor which encapsulated not only Taylor's
unpredictability, but also illustrated the rural background of many within
the UUC itself. Taylor, they suggested, 'was like a Corncrake. You know
there's one about - but you can never tell which field it's in!' While Taylor's
final position at the UUC meeting was important to the outcome of the meeting,
a key concession was made to unionists who were reluctant to vote for the
revised policy due to fear that the IRA would not deliver on its 'obligation'
to decommission. In effect, a motion was put to the UUC that imposed a time
limit on decommissioning and suspended the party's final position on the
implementation of the Agreement until a further meeting, to take place some
time in February. If this time limit was not met, then post-dated letters
of resignation from the four unionists in the new executive, lodged with
the party president Josiah Cunningham, would be activated and the structures
of the Good Friday Agreement would be collapsed. While Trimble and his senior
colleagues believed that this was the price necessary to win the vote in
the UUC, end the political stalemate over decommissioning, and begin the
process of setting up the structures agreed in April 1998, the practical
result of this motion was to undermine the Mitchell Review in the eyes of
republicans. By unionists imposing their own time limit on the achievement
of decommissioning, which was not part of the Good Friday Agreement or the
Mitchell Review, the UUC had (certainly as far as the IRA was concerned)
effectively introduced another precondition into the political process.
In the event, Trimble narrowly won the vote at the UUC meeting by a margin
of 58 per cent to 42 per cent.44 While the UUC vote opened the way for the
triggering of d'Hondt, the establishment of the Executive and the devolution
of transferred powers to Stormont for the first time in twenty-five years,
the UUC's decision to withhold final approval for these new structures until
February destabilised the embryonic administration. Although unionists might
point out that this was only because the IRA failed to meet their 'obligation'
to decommission, republicans saw this as a unionist precondition on the
legitimate right of Sinn Féin to sit in government on the basis of their
mandate, a sign of bad faith on the part of David Trimble and the UUP, and
as an attempt at renegotiating both the Mitchell Review and the Good Friday
Agreement itself. |
