Dean Godson – Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism (страница 16)
Whatever was or was not agreed, on 29 August 1975, the UUUC negotiators were told by Lowry that the SDLP had said that it was prepared to accept the the Unionists’ position of 26 August as a basis for further discussion. As the official Vanguard record, drafted by Trimble and approved by others, then states: ‘However it was recognised that further exploration was needed to see if the detail of such an agreement should be settled. Ian Paisley arrived and discussed the matter with Mr Craig. On their way out to their cars, Mr Paisley told Mr Craig that such an agreement would be satisfactory to the Unionist people if it was put in a referendum first … it was stated that the SDLP appreciated that there could be no constitutional guarantee within the structures of government envisaged by the UUUC and that consequently they could have no assurance beyond the life of the first Parliament and that they would be liable to dismissal if they failed to support government policy. It was also stated that the SDLP had agreed that “the first tasks of the new government would be to wage war on the terrorists”… they also accepted that the [Northern Ireland] Parliament should control security and have appropriate forces – indeed they said that they would prefer the war against terrorism to be waged by local forces rather than by Westminster.’25 On 3 September 1975, according to Lowry, the UUUC negotiators came to him and requested that he prepare a paper on the voluntary coalition and the SDLP followed suit with a similar request: Hugh Logue, then an SDLP Convention member, says that although the SDLP were not at all enthusiastic about this idea, they decided that it would not be politically advantageous to shoot it down: ‘Our view was “let’s see if Vanguard can deliver”,’ he recalls. ‘The problem was that had it become a real offer it would have caused tensions within the SDLP – and would certainly have triggered a vigorous debate.’26 Indeed, Trimble remembers asking John Hume if he thought he could carry the whole of the SDLP: the Derryman calculated that they would lose three to four out of the party’s seventeen-strong Convention caucus.27
Lowry’s paper was delivered on 4 September. At the UUUC policy committee meeting that day, it became clear that Paisley would now oppose the plan. ‘In the course of argument Dr Paisley conceded that there was no alternative way of regaining a Parliament but nonetheless felt that the price was too high,’ noted the official Vanguard record. ‘He said that all we could do was to await divine intervention. Billy Beattie privately informed a Vanguard member that the DUP would leave the coalition and said they were going out to rouse the country against this “sell-out” although he had not clearly dissented from the initiative earlier in the week.’28 (Beattie reiterates that this was because he believed the proposals as originally presented were different from what they subsequently turned out to be.) Craig may have been under the impression that the UUUC team had agreed to his proposals; but when the matter went to the separate Vanguard and UUP Convention caucuses within the UUUC coalition, it was clear that the Unionists of all shades were split by the voluntary coalition proposal. David Trimble, addressing his fellow Vanguardists at Saintfield in the following year, laid the blame squarely at the door of the UUUC rather than the SDLP: ‘At this point, the UUUC panicked. The thought of obtaining an agreement even on their own terms so scared them that they broke off talks.’29
Reg Empey, then a Convention member, says that Craig never consulted him about the idea – even though he was chairman of Vanguard and his running mate in East Belfast. There had been no meeting of the party’s full council, nor any debate at constituency level, and once leaks started to appear in the press, local party workers started to make alarmed calls to headquarters. The Vanguard leader insisted ‘that they had to strike while the iron is hot’ remembers Empey. ‘I observed that we had been the principal complainants under O’Neill that there had been no consultation and numerous attempts to bounce the party into decisions without debate. But Bill had made up his mind, he was absolutely rigid and inflexible. Back me or sack me was his approach. He didn’t take a conciliatory approach to colleagues.’30 Certainly, the lack of preparation of the grassroots contributed to the emerging debacle, but it was not the only cause of it. As so often in Northern Ireland, terrorist action played its part in hardening attitudes: on 1 September 1975, four Protestants were murdered by the South Armagh Republican Action Force (a cover name for the Provisional IRA) at the Tullyvallen Orange Hall in Newtownhamilton, Co. Armagh.31
A more important cause of the the Voluntary Coalition disaster lay in the internal dynamics of Unionist politics – or, more precisely in this instance, Protestant politics. For when word of it leaked out to Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, the reaction of his co-religionists was unanimous: have nothing to do with this. At a Church meeting on 7 September, Paisley was told that any further dalliance with the coalition idea would divide the Free Presbyterians as well as the DUP.32 Trimble also discerned two reactions within the UUP. The first related to their doubts about holding their own supporters in line with Paisley touring the country denouncing the proponents of the scheme as ‘Vanguard Republicans’. But the second calculation was, Trimble believes to this day, more cynical: that many of them saw Craig’s gamble as a way of destroying the Vanguard leader. After all, by the 1975 Convention elections, Vanguard had leapt into second place in terms of the overall number of seats within the UUUC coalition (14 compared to the DUP’s 12 and the UUP’s 19, even though it was still third in terms of the popular vote). Moreover, it had more capable people than the DUP and UUP. In fact, as Clifford Smyth – a not uncritical observer – notes in his biography of Paisley, such low calculation was probably not the motive of the DUP leader in this instance: whilst ‘the Doc’ did eventually reap political rewards from the destruction of Vanguard, there was no way of knowing this for sure on 8 September 1975. After all, no one can have anticipated that having gone up the Voluntary Coalition cul-de-sac, and been stymied, Craig would not have been nimble-footed enough to extricate himself.33 But above all, the bulk of elected Unionists were in no mind to compromise on very much after 1974: the Convention was, in Maurice Hayes’s words, ‘Unionism’s victory lap’.34 So when the idea of a Voluntary Coalition was put forward at a full meeting of the UUUC Convention group, the proposal was duly rejected. Paisley then put forward a motion rejecting the presence of ‘republicans’ in the Government of Northern Ireland, which was passed by 37–1; although he was one of Craig’s staunchest supporters, Trimble actually abstained, reasoning that there would be no point in being the sole dissenter in the room (Craig, he says, had left by this point).35
Craig’s offer also prompted astonishment in England – and praise from unlikely quarters.36 An
Craig then proceeded to launch a media blitz to overturn the UUUC decision, spearheaded by Burnside and Trimble, and he won the support of the Vanguard Central Council on 11 October by 128 votes to 79 after a fighting speech. But the bulk of the Convention party were not with him and shortly thereafter they formed the United Ulster Unionist Movement. Then, following a five-hour meeting at Stormont Craig, Trimble, Barr and Green were expelled from the UUUC grouping. The Ernie Baird faction was admitted in their place, and Baird himself became deputy leader of the UUUC.38 But Trimble’s own expulsion was delayed. The reason had nothing to do with any innate affection for the man amongst his brother loyalists. Rather, it had everything to do with the fact that as chairman of the UUUC drafting committee he was the main author of the report which had to be delivered imminently by each of the parties. Despite some suggestions that he leave his detractors in the lurch, Trimble completed the task, asserting that it was vital for Unionism that it be done properly.39 After the split, he also became deputy leader of the rump Vanguard party.