To demonstrate that the AIA had no support in the majority population, the fifteen UUP, DUP and independent Unionist MPs resigned to create a massive Province-wide by-election: the SDLP put up candidates in only four of the most marginal constituencies. On 24 January 1986, the Unionists secured an overwhelming 418,230 votes and held all of their seats bar Newry-Armagh. This took the gloss off the victory. Indeed, the rise in the SDLP vote at the expense of Sinn Fein allowed the Government to claim that its strategy of strengthening constitutional nationalism was working. The collapse in the pro-Agreement (but loosely unionist with a lower case ‘u’) Alliance party vote showed the virtual unanimity within the Unionist family against the diktat. Gradually, all of Ulster-British society mobilised. Eighteen councils with Unionist majorities, including Lisburn, adjourned; rates protests followed; and southern Irish goods were boycotted (Trimble thought this last form of protest to be silly, but went along with it in the spirit of the times). The culmination of this phase of struggle was the Loyalist ‘Day of Action’, held on 3 March, whose purpose was to bring the whole of Northern Ireland to a standstill. Lisburn, of course, was to do its bit and set up a municipal coordinating committee comprised of representatives of the UUP, DUP, Loyal Orders, Ulster Clubs and farmers’ bodies. After a series of road blocks, to shut off the town, they would then adjourn for a mass rally at Smithfield Square in the town centre.
It was, though, an organisational nightmare. Trimble knew that street protests had to be managed. And the only people who could exert sufficient influence to prevent things spiralling out of control were the paramilitaries themselves. When tempers frayed, such crowd scenes could easily degenerate into full blown riots. Trimble participated in an ad-hoc action committee of 20 that included McMichael, whose purpose was to discusss the arrangements for the event. They decided on peaceful pickets of all the main arteries leading in and out of town. Trimble went around the traders in Bow Street, asking for their support: only one of them, he recalls, gave a dusty response. On the day itself, he positioned himself on the Hillsborough Road. During the course of the protest, some UDA men began to thump a bus which had been stopped. Trimble tried to stop them and they told him in no uncertain terms where to go. He rang McMichael, who duly told them to cease, and was always grateful to the UDA leader for sticking by what they had agreed.30 Later in the day, Trimble presided at the mass rally in Smithfield Square, packed with families and farm vehicles. The Ulster Star – a local newspaper – reported on 7 March 1986 that he saluted the work of the coordinating committee. ‘Mr Lawson Patterson and Mr Eddie Blair were thanked for arranging the tractor cavalcade and there was praise for the representatives of the Loyal Orders and Mr John McMichael, of the UDA.’ But there was an uglier side to some of the subsequent protests as well. Lisburn RUC men who were put in the front line of policing the demonstrations were burned out of their homes and Seamus Close of the local Alliance party claimed it was significant that these had come on the heels of ‘sinister and intimidatory’ comments by UDA spokesmen.31 Indeed, later that year, the Housing Executive reported 114 instances of intimidation against Roman Catholic families in the greater Lisburn area. ‘It was a very unhappy time,’ recalls Trimble. But he was determined not to allow that element to spoil the legitimate demonstrations of others.32 In May 1986, on the occasion of the intergovernmental conference, Trimble and his fellow loyalists took over the rates office, urging householders and businessmen to withhold payments for as long as possible. He hoped that if enough people did so, the temporary shortfall would cost the Treasury £100 million in interest payments. When he eventually paid up, he did so with a giant, blown-up four foot by ten hardboard cheque for £616.16 drawn on his own and Daphne Trimble’s personal account: he had derived the idea from A.P. Herbert, who once wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. When Peter Barry, the Irish Foreign Minister, visited Northern Ireland on 17 June 1986, Trimble and others chained themselves to the railings at Hillsborough Castle; he arrived at work on the next day to find a photograph of the stunt displayed on the front page of the News Letter: it certainly annoyed his supporters at Queen’s such as Herb Wallace, who at the time was ‘managing’ his campaign to be elected Dean of the Law Faculty. In the eyes of the university authorities, it may well have confirmed their impression that Trimble was someone unsuitable for preferment.33 Indeed, Trimble received two convictions for minor public order offences, such as parading without a permit in Lisburn with his own branch of the Apprentice Boys of Derry.
As time went on, it became clear that the Government would not budge. It correctly calculated – on the advice of Sir Robert Armstrong and other senior officials – that there would be no repeat of 1974.34 They also came to this conclusion on the basis of assessments from the security forces.35 For in 1974, there was a locally-based political experiment to bring down. This time, there was an unassailable international treaty signed by two governments which could not be pressurised like the Faulk – nerites were. The ‘Irish dimension’ had thus been used to outflank the Unionist majority in Ulster. Or, as John Hume was reported as saying, ‘I always expected a furious Unionist reaction to the Agreement, but the Protestant boil had to be lanced.’36 The Government also saw that hardline loyalist protests, such as the 1977 strike and Paisley’s much-vaunted ‘Carson Trail’ of 1981 had been damp squibs: in the more straitened financial circumstances of the 1980s, loyalists were less prepared to engage in the kind of industrial militancy which had proven so successful across the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Partly, this was conditioned by the growing dependence of both the Protestant and the Catholic working classes on the subvention of the United Kingdom Exchequer. Above all, the British Government correctly reasoned that the ultra-respectable Molyneaux and the UUP would never sanction a mass uprising: indeed, Molyneaux and his party only accepted the March 1986 Day of Action when they were left with no other choice.37
Unionist protests became ever more desperate, partly out of frustration with the Unionist leadership. In his first major interview in the News Letter, on 6 November 1986, Trimble said: ‘If you have a situation where there is a serious attack on your constitutional position and liberties – and I regard the AIA as being just that – and where the Government tells you constitutional action is ineffective, you are left in a very awkward situation. Do you sit back and do nothing, or move outside constitutional forms of protest? I don’t think you can deal with the situation without the risk of an extra-parliamentary campaign. I would personally draw the line at terrorism and serious violence. But if we are talking about a campaign that involves demonstrations and so on, then a certain amount of violence may be inescapable.’ In fact, Trimble’s course in this period was seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, he wanted an escalation of protests, warning that unless the Unionist leadership improved its performance, the paramilitaries would soon take over. On the other hand, during the June 1987 General Election, he was struck by the reaction on the doorstep in Lisburn. There was hostility to the council boycott – as reflected in the Lagan Valley Unionist Association minute books – but more especially to the MPs’ policy of staying out of the Commons chamber. Boycotts were to Trimble a tactic, not a principle, and if they were undermining the struggle then they would have to be wound down. But if Trimble’s methods for attaining his goals were variable, so were his goals. On the one hand, he lent his support to those Unionists who responded to the AIA by urging complete integration into the United Kingdom; on the other, he flirted with constitutional forms which resembled independence. He was the most senior Unionist to campaign in a personal capacity in the 1986 Fulham by-election for his Queen’s colleague Boyd Black, then a B&ICO activist, who ran as Democratic Rights for Northern Ireland candidate. And although many integrationist themes found their way into Ulster Clubs’ literature (indeed, Boyd Black’s election address was printed on the front page of Ulster Defiant), Trimble’s own pamphlet for Ulster Clubs explored a much wider range of options, ranging from Powellite-style total integration to independence. The treatise was entitled What Choice for Ulster? and it came down on the side of Dominion status – in other words, a relationship that bore more similarity to full independence than integration. It was an unusually glossy publication by the Samizdat-like standards of Loyalist pamphlets: the front cover bore the famous propaganda poster entitled Ulster 1914, with the Province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair. She defiantly carries her rifle against a Union Jack background, proclaiming the words ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone’.
