Politics
Trimble prepares for his final stand
Published 05 February 1999
John Lloydreveals that the Unionist leader has decided he cannot serve in a cabinet with the leaders of Sinn Fein
The Provisional IRA, the most successful terrorist group in the democratic world, has made greater gains through the adroit use of terror than most political parties have through the most scrupulous observation of the constitution. Thirty or more years ago the IRA was a marginalised sect with few weapons, little organisation and little that could be called a strategy.
What a difference a war has made! The IRA has seen a great deal accomplished in the past three decades, for at least some of which it can claim credit. The parliament at Stormont, with a Unionist majority since its creation, was prorogued. The anti-terrorist units or "B Special" police were disbanded - and now the Royal Ulster Constabulary itself is under review, with the IRA's political front, Sinn Fein, being consulted on how it should change. Unionism is split into three parties and several groups, bitterly at odds with each other - while Sinn Fein and the main nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, had a de facto alliance which got and kept the republicans in the talks, and then the peace process. Next month, according to the timetable of that peace process, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the leaders of Sinn Fein, will enter the cabinet of the Assembly of Northern Ireland - a state they have fought like tigers to destroy - and become ministers of the crown.
It will not happen. It is a leap too far. This month and next, the peace process faces its hardest test by far - a test in which the main parties will be challenged to see who flinches first; who makes the concessions; who changes his position. It is possible that out of this, the peace process will go on in the way it was designed. But it is unlikely.
Adams and McGuinness will not enter the cabinet because one of the main party leaders has made his mind up that they will not. David Trimble, First Minister-designate for Northern Ireland, has a game plan for the next few weeks which he cannot change unless he wishes to lose his leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party. At its base is a refusal to contemplate heading a cabinet that includes two members who are the political voices of an IRA which has refused to renounce violence permanently or to decommission any of its arms.
Under the Agreement of last April, powers will be devolved to the Northern Irish Assembly on 15 February and the executive, or cabinet, must be constituted by 10 March. But Trimble will not agree to that. Convinced that Sinn Fein has not kept its end of the bargain, Trimble will invoke a clause in the Agreement that triggers an automatic review, by the Northern Ireland Office, of the commitment of the political parties that are signatories to the terms of the Agreement. The IRA has not begun to decommission; and it is sanctioning "punishment beatings" to enforce its rule over many nationalist areas. These beatings often end in death or are straightforward murders, as in the case of the assassination last week of Eamon Collins, the former IRA officer who wrote a book exposing its sectarian hatreds.
This tactic - which Trimble calls "parking the process" - was conveyed to Tony Blair in meetings this week. At the same time, Trimble wrote to Amnesty International in London and Human Rights Watch in New York, inviting them to send observers to Northern Ireland to discover the scale of terror now being visited on both nationalist and unionist communities by the paramilitaries. Unionists have always suspected these human rights organisations of being ideologically hostile to them, dominated as they are by the left and by liberals. Trimble, though, wants to reach across the political divide; to lift unionism out of a laager in which its only friends were the dwindling ranks of Conservative unionists who took an interest in Northern Irish affairs. Trimble is not the standard-issue Unionist leader, if there was such a thing. He seeks advice widely and is prepared to acknowledge, and to confront his own sectarian prejudices. But on one thing he cannot move: he cannot bring the representatives of terror into the governance of the province unless they renounce the ideology to which they have been wedded for a century.
Trimble does not know if he can trust Tony Blair. Blair has seen Adams many times; he seems to believe that the Sinn Fein leader is striving to convince his organisation of the merits of participating fully in the Assembly, and that he thus needs support - manifested in the continued release of republican prisoners. He is worried that the bipartisanship that has been a feature of policy on Northern Ireland for some five years under both Tory and Labour governments may now be straining to breaking point: the Tories are expressing growing outrage over the lack of decommissioning coupled with prisoner release and the rising incidence of punishment beatings.
Blair, though, is perceived to be friendlier to unionism than the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, whom most unionists distrust; and Blair did last week publicly correct Mowlam after she had suggested in a radio interview that she did not have the legal authority to stop prisoner releases. But though Mowlam's style is anathema, it is straining credulity to believe that, in a tightly controlled administration with a Prime Minister who is spending more time on the matter than on any other single issue, she will stray far from an agreed line. Blair believes he must appear to be even-handed among all parties and between the two main traditions, and that this posture will be regarded, at different times, as "unfair" to one or other of these traditions.
Even-handedness is becoming a harder and harder position to maintain. The murder of Eamon Collins on top of increasingly well-publicised terror in the nationalist areas rips the veil away from Sinn Fein's protestations of adhesion to the terms of the Agreement. If Blair's administration is centralised, the IRA has been super-centralised - with the roughest of justice handed out to those who act on their own. Adams and McGuinness remain trapped by a remorseless logic. Either they are doing nothing to stop the violence, in which case they cannot be committed to the peace process. Or they are unable to stop the violence (even perhaps don't know about it), in which case they clearly have no purchase on the IRA and are therefore of no value to the peace process.
A startling poll taken in the Irish Republic over the weekend for the Sunday Independent, Ireland's best-selling Sunday paper, showed that 81 per cent of the respondents thought that the punishment beatings were in breach of the Agreement and 61 per cent thought that prisoners should not be released while they continued. John Bruton, the former taoiseach and now leader of the opposition, is pressing the government hard to hold the paramilitaries to account. Bertie Ahern, the present taoiseach, weakened by a money scandal lapping about his administration, is in no state to defy public opinion.
For Adams, much of this is sound and fury: he has not survived at the top of the IRA for the past 20 years without developing nerves unruffled by the screams of tortured victims or the dire warnings of politicians he despises. He has survived the conclusion of the peace agreement and the (muted) charges of betrayal it sparked within republican ranks by continuing to push for a full delivery of all the Agreement's privileges and an evasion of all of its responsibilities. He has calculated, rightly from his position, that his best tactic is to continue to stick it to David Trimble and the Unionists and delay any final decision until they can move no further. It is unlikely the Sinn Fein president has seriously thought through what observance of the Agreement and membership of a cabinet really means; he has certainly not striven to prepare his membership for it.
Thus for Blair and Adams, but not for Trimble, most of the options are still open. The Agreement is still formally on the road; actually, it is paper thin, with most unionists giving it less than a 50-50 chance and none willing to make further compromises for it. Blair, with great skill, has taken Trimble and (so far) the majority of unionists down a road that has seen them swallow much from men they had come to hate as murderers; but that road is now at an end. Adams will have to show his hand over the next two months - and so will Blair. The Agreement was only the beginning of what might be a new politics in Northern Ireland: and now it is almost the end of the beginning.
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