FOCUS THINGS FALL APART: `Somebody thought the sensible thing was to drive into the wall'
From SUNDAY TELEGRAPH July 18th, 1999
In his first full interview since refusing to attend last Thursday's Northern
Ireland Assembly, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble tells David
Cracknell why he will not be resigning as First Minister - for now
By DAVID CRACKNELL
WHEN David Trimble feels most under pressure, when he feels like the loneliest
man in politics, he sits down and plays solitaire on his laptop computer.
Or he goes shopping. A few days ago, during intense negotiations on the
Blair/Ahern blueprint which finally crashed on Thursday, the Ulster Unionist
leader suddenly disappeared from his office high up in the eaves of the
House of Commons. An hour later, he reappeared clutching an Army and Navy
bag containing half a dozen new shirts. He had given his security guards
the slip and popped to the shops in nearby Victoria Street. These impulse
trips are not uncommon for the Ulster politician - and his library has grown
apace, along with his CD collection (Elvis Presley and Van Morrison are
particular favourites) as he has coped with the stress of trying to bring
lasting peace to Ulster with a deal that is agreeable to his party. Last
week, however, the pressure on the Ulster Unionists became too much; the
efforts by Downing Street to force them to agree to share power with Sinn
Fein before the IRA had handed in any weapons was the last straw - at least
for this summer. So much so that the 54-year-old Mr Trimble came close to
resigning as Northern Ireland First Minister on Thursday, the day that his
deputy, the SDLP's Seamus Mallon, went. Senior party aides believed he was
within two hours of standing down, as Mr Mallon had urged. But, after a
night's sleep, he decided against it. In his first full interview since
his party decided not to proceed without decommissioning, Mr Trimble told
me that he still had doubts about whether to continue as First Minister.
"I haven't made a final decision," he said, "but there is a serious danger that if I were to walk away, then that would increase the feeling in the community that [the whole Good Friday Agreement] was going down." In an 18-minute meeting on Wednesday night, this intransigence of the Ulster Unionist ruling body on the issue of the IRA handing in its weapons scuppered No
10's attempts to rush through legislation devolving power to the province.
Mr Trimble had clubbed together with the Tories the previous day to attempt
to amend the legislation and halt prisoner releases if the IRA failed to
decommission, but Mr Blair refused to give way. The extent of Mr Trimble's
frustration was evident when he left the Commons on Tuesday night at 10.45pm
without staying to vote on the Third Reading of the Bill. The newspapers
had taken this as an "abstention" and wrongly interpreted it as a promising
sign. By the time Downing Street decided to make major concessions in the
Northern Ireland Bill, it was too late. Once his party had agreed to stick
to the principle that it could not sit in government with Sinn Féin without
a clear timetable for IRA decommissioning, it was impossible for Mr Trimble
to attend the meeting of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont on Thursday
at which ministers were to be appointed. He says the Prime Minister had
assured him that there would be a "soft landing", but Mr Trimble's empty
chair, Mr Mallon's resignation and the Government's parking of the peace
process for the summer amounted to what the Ulster Unionist leader calls
"a crash". Mr Trimble traces the problem to the Hillsborough Declaration
in April, when Mr Blair tried to get the republicans to agree to make IRA
decommissioning a requirement before Sinn Féin could join the Ulster executive.
But the republican leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, rejected
that attempt and the Government turned to the Ulster Unionists to make concessions
instead. "They had been spending months trying to push the republicans,"
says Mr Trimble. "It hadn't succeeded. So they said: `Oh well, we can't move them, let's turn around and see if we can move the other people.' I'm not particularly enamoured of that way of proceeding. " "I felt that the switch of attention by Downing Street was inappropriate and that the thing to do was to persuade the republicans to implement their part of the agreementThey should have stayed focused on that." Mr Trimble believes that the Prime
Minister has been seeking to rush the Unionists into an over-hasty solution.
A case in point was the way he was suddenly presented with a plan - later
enshrined in the Blair/Ahern Way Forward document - at a dinner at No 10
last month which contemplated Sinn Féin in government prior to decommissioning.
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