Lord Trimble Obituary North Ireland

The Nobel body described Trimble, who died aged 77 after a short illness, as a “compromiser” who was once known “for his relentless stance towards Catholics” and praised his “political bravery” in trying to peace agreement that had been signed on Good Friday of that year. In the election under the resulting power-sharing constitution he became first minister and served until 2002. Trimble’s surprise election in September 1995 as leader of the Ulster Unionist party had come about because he attracted hardliners within the UUP. In July of that year, he and Ian Paisley, leader of the even more extreme Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), had marched hand-in-hand along Garvaghy Catholic Road in Portadown, Armagh, leading an Orange Order parade to Drumcree Church. But, according to the Nobel Prize report, “a few weeks after the party leaders took over… [Trimble] started discussions with his political opponents.” In 2008, when reviewing Great Hatred, Little Room, the account of the peace process by Jonathan Powell, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland, Trimble gave a clue to his motivation. He wrote that Powell was “wrong in his belief that the goal was to build trust, which is overrated and often wrong. The issue in politics is, rather, can you do business with the other side?” Trimble was driven by a passion to create a secure future in Northern Ireland for families like his, who were “proudly” descended from those Scottish Protestant planters who were settled in Ireland after 1690 by William of Orange when he defeated the Catholic King James II. David Trimble, left, with Bono, center, and John Hume in 1998. Photo: Paul McErlane/AP Trimble never lost his distrust of Catholics, even those with whom he negotiated, such as Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), and certainly not Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin who was also involved in peace negotiations. For eight months of the talks, Trimble refused to speak directly to Adams and did not shake his hand until 2000. Trimble said in 2014 that he would have declined the Nobel Prize if Adams had been nominated. In the House of Commons in 1998, Trimble opposed the establishment of an inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings on January 30, 1972, when paratroopers from the 1st Parachute Regiment killed 14 unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry. The Saville Inquiry, agreed as part of the peace settlement, was to re-investigate Lord (John) Whithery’s report as chief justice, which in 1972 had acquitted the paratroopers. Trimble said, “I’m sorry to say … I think the hope that has been expressed … that this will be part of the healing process is likely to be misplaced … The basic facts of the situation are known and beyond dispute.” In 2010, at the time, Trimble was a rare voice of caution when Prime Minister David Cameron read Lord (Mark) Saville’s report to the Commons. Cameron said, “There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal … What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustified.” Trimble said he accepted the killings were wrong but that “it would be perverse if the events of Bloody Sunday were used to justify those unjustifiable events which the PIRA [the Provisional IRA] which started in the 1970s”. Two Royal Ulster Constabulary officers, he pointed out, were killed in Derry the day before Bloody Sunday. David Trimble, left, with Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator, centre, and Gerry Adams, SF president, in Hillsborough, Northern Ireland, 1999. Photo: Paul McErlane/Reuters It was that violence, which began with incarceration in August 1971, that first brought Trimble away from Queen’s University Belfast, where he was a lecturer and dean of the law school, and into politics. Writing in the Irish Times in 2007, he said: “I became fully involved in Northern Ireland politics in the winter of 1972-73, on the back of the worst year of the Troubles when around 500 people were killed… it was the extension of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule that threatened to destabilize society. Like many unionists, … I feared that London’s aim was to steer us in the direction of a united Ireland.’ His motivation was to protect Northern Ireland within the UK, but not directly from Westminster. Trimble had four children and his often-expressed fear was that, like many middle-class Protestants, they would go to university in Britain and never return. That his youngest son, Nicholas, became UUP secretary for Trimble justified the often brutal effort he put into that 1998 settlement. The son of Ivy (née Jack) and William Trimble, who had met when they were civil servants, David was born in Bangor, County Down, into a comfortable lower-middle-class Presbyterian family. After Bangor Grammar, he studied law at Queen’s University and tried, he said, to let the civil rights movement pass him by. He entered the law school in 1968 as a lecturer and was called to the Northern Ireland bar the following year. Edward Heath then suspended Stormond. Trimble had joined the Orange Order when he was 17, but only became active when he joined Vanguard, the loyalist movement founded in 1972 by former unionist cabinet member William Craig. From his early days in active politics, Trimble moved on the fringes of the murky world of paramilitary loyalists. As Craig’s henchman, he organized thousands-strong rallies against the power-sharing agreed by the Sunningdale conference in 1973. During the Ulster workers’ strike of 1974, Trimble of necessity formed links with the paramilitary Ulster Defense Union, led by Andy Tarry. He then used these loyal contacts when he needed them. But Trimble also maintained contacts with nationalists, even into the 1970s, and in 1975 he negotiated a possible coalition with Paddy Devlin, the West Belfast nationalist politician. Trimble was one of seven Vanguard members elected to the assembly created after the Northern Ireland Constitutional Assembly in 1975. Then, when Vanguard collapsed in 1977, he continued as a senior lecturer at Queen’s. But it moved on quickly in 1989 when Harold McCusker, the UUP MP for Upper Bann, died. In the intervening years Trimble had quietly joined the UUP and in 1990 became the Westminster MP for Upper Bann, the constituency that included Drumcree. In the Commons, Trimble was a thorn in the side of UUP leader James Molyneaux, with whom his only common interest was opera. Molyneaux believed in full integration into the UK. Trimble saw a devolved administration with a walled constitutional status in the UK and a negotiated relationship with Ireland as the safest option. He believed that integration was impractical given the stark differences between Northern Ireland and Britain’s economic needs, particularly in Europe. In this he was in the mainstream of the Ulster business persuasion. When Molyneaux was ousted in 1995, Trimble took over the leadership of the party. As leader he took the UUP into peace talks with the SDLP. Trimble’s links with the Nationalists were never completely severed, but he was nevertheless reluctant to enter into talks with Hume, particularly as Hume was also negotiating with Adams and through him former IRA commander Martin McGuinness . Trimble was persuaded to the conference table by Blair and by Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister. He in turn persuaded the UUP to sign the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and agree to the 1999 executive, in which Trimble became first minister, with Hume’s deputy, Seamus Mallon, as his deputy first minister. As leader, his Achilles’ heel was his relationship with John Taylor (now Lord Kilclooney), his deputy, and Jeffrey Donaldson, the right-wing barrister who eventually joined the DUP. They provoked a certain hostility, particularly when Trimble agreed to “jump first”, sharing power with Sinn Féin in the 1999 executive, before the IRA decommissioned the weapons. Trimble convinced the union board to accept this compromise by writing his late resignation to take effect if no weapons were decommissioned by February 2000. The board held Trimble to the resignation. To save his leadership he asked Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson to suspend the executive. The executive was eventually reinstated but in the end Trimble was kicked out anyway. In 2005 he lost his seat at Westminster and in 2006 he resigned as party leader and ascended to the House of Lords. A year later he joined the Conservatives. He said that as an 18-year-old he had assumed he might have a political life as a Conservative, but had been sidetracked by problems in domestic politics. As a Conservative he felt he would have more influence in Northern Ireland, but he was also involved in wider issues, including the international Friends of Israel Initiative, and served on the Turkel Commission in 2010, set up by the Israeli government, which established the Gaza Blockade flotilla from Israel to be legal. Trimble reconciled politically, though never personally, with Hume. He even showed some admiration for McGuinness when he discovered him showing children around Stormont, the ultimate symbol of Protestant supremacy. He maintained a naïve conviction that trade unionists were unfairly accused of discrimination and was proud of his Scottish roots. He said of educational attainment in Northern Ireland, “That’s the Scottish factor. Culture places great value on education.” He insisted in the Good Friday negotiations that Ulster Scots should be given a dictionary and given parity with Gaelic. David Tribble, second…