Dean Godson – Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism (страница 33)

Major had to persist, even though he knew that the Frameworks Documents were still-born: to have abandoned them, he felt, would definitively have proven to nationalist Ireland that the British Government was in hock to the Unionists. Instead, he opted to shave down the most controversial parts – much to the irritation of the Irish – in the hope that elements of the Frameworks would prove to be a basis for negotiation at a later date. When the Documents were published in Belfast on 22 February 1995, Unionists were not mollified. Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Fein seemed happy enough, telling a conference at the University of North London that ‘John Major, by the very act of publishing the Frameworks Documents in the teeth of opposition from right-wing Conservatives and the Unionist leaderships has demonstrated that his government is not totally hostage to the mathematics of Westminster’.³⁴ The Strand I proposals posited a 90-member assembly, elected by PR, serving four- or five-year terms, with all-party committees overseeing the work of the Northern Ireland departments; their activity would be scrutinised by a three-man elected panel (Hume had envisaged a six-man panel, with EU and British and Irish Government representatives: this was his way of circumventing Northern Ireland’s in-built Unionist majority, but it was negotiated away by the British, not least because they feared that it would inflame neuralgic Eurosceptic sensibilities on the backbenches and in the Cabinet: ministers were mindful of the problems that might arise if the causes of Euroscepticism and Unionism became bound up with each other). Strand II, on the North-South dimension, reiterated many of the principles of the December 1993 Joint Declaration and stated that such bodies were to exercise ‘on a democratically accountable basis delegated executive, harmonising and consultative functions’. The designated topics for harmonisation would include agriculture and fisheries; industrial development; consumer affairs; transport, energy, trade, health, social welfare, education and economic policy. The remit of the body should be dynamic, enabling progressive extension by agreement of its functions to new areas. Its role should be developed to keep pace with the growth of harmonisation and with greater integration between the two economies. Furthermore, the Irish Government pledged to make changes to its Constitution which would fully reflect the principle of consent and which would show that no territorial claim of right contrary to the will of Northern Ireland’s majority be asserted.³⁵

Major claimed that this renunciation was ‘crucial’ and that any such North-South bodies would not be free-standing but would rather be democratically accountable to the assembly. Nor, he said, was there a predetermined list of such functions as they would exercise: indeed, the definition of harmonisation in education, as revealed under paragraph 33, included such prosaic notions as mutual recognition of teacher qualifications. The NIO held this to be evidence that they had, once again, delivered an ‘Orange document in Green-speak’. Despite these glosses, and despite Major’s reiteration of the ‘triple lock’ – the formulation whereby any deal had to have the endorsement of the Westminster Parliament, and the people and the parties of Northern Ireland – the Unionists were not reassured. Nor were many on the Tory backbenches. If devolution, proportional representation and a Bill of Rights were so unsuitable for Great Britain, why were they suddenly so beneficial for Northern Ireland? In and of themselves, these were not great issues for David Trimble, though. Certainly, Ulster’s anomalous treatment vexed as much as it always had done, but Trimble was no purist defender of English constitutional norms as he saw them and he believed in a continent of empowered regions. Rather, Trimble’s worries focused on paragraphs 46 and 47: as Unionists interpreted them, these held that if the assembly ever collapsed, the default mechanism would allow the two Governments to continue to operate North-South bodies without any local input. Those bodies would be free-standing and not be set up by the assembly. They could, therefore, easily become the vehicle for creeping, even rolling unification. That this would be the case was proven by the fact that their functions were invested with a character that was described as ‘dynamic’, ‘executive’ and ‘harmonising’. The ‘d’, ‘e’ and ‘h’ words assumed a great importance to Trimble, as did the authority under which they operated: during the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement of 1998, Trimble devoted great amounts of his energy and political capital to excising these atrributes and to making sure that the Strand II institutions were explicitly accountable to the assembly. Even as they stood, the listed of areas of cooperation – such as health – were amongst the most sensitive for many unionists. After all, Catholic values still held sway on the medical ethics committees of hospitals in the Republic. How would greater integration with such a system affect the freedoms of Ulsterwomen within the NHS? Moreover, any hint that priests might have a hand in the upbringing of Protestant children was potentially explosive. Trimble further warned that British-Irish ideas for harmonising key welfare policies would threaten the right of the Province’s taxpayers to equality of treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom, for which Sir James Craig had fought so hard. Would Northern Ireland be harmonised down to the Irish level or would the Republic be harmonised up to the British level? Nor was Trimble satisfied with the apparent withdrawal of the Irish constitutional claim over Northern Ireland. Whilst the Irish undertook in Frameworks to withdraw the claim to jurisdiction, they did not satisfactorily expunge the claim to territory and thus denied Northern Ireland explicit legitimacy in southern eyes.

But the failure to keep the Ulster Unionists on board was much wider than just Major’s inability to tie the Irish down more precisely. Some senior figures in the Government felt that the failure to repeat the delicate balancing exercise of the DSD could be ascribed to the fact that whereas the DSD was mainly formulated out of No. 10, the Frameworks was mainly drafted in the NIO; and that officials such as Quentin Thomas had become too close to their Irish opposite numbers such as Sean O hUiginn and that they failed to see the political wood for the bureaucratic trees. Certainly, Molyneaux believed this and told Major that ‘they’ve double crossed us again’ – a variant of his old line that ‘the rats have been at work’.³⁶ Was this really the case, though? It was always easy to blame civil servants, especially under the circumstances of direct rule in Northern Ireland. There, they wielded exceptional powers under ministers who were not MPs in Ulster and thus were not democratically accountable in the normal way. Moreover, much of their information on the correlation of political and military forces inevitably derived from secret organs of state. Certainly, Michael Ancram believes that Thomas had an instinct to undo Lloyd George’s historic error in agreeing to partition Ireland and that he frequently restrained Thomas from going too far.³⁷ Not so, says Thomas. He claims that he was, in fact, trying to stabilise the status quo but that he also believed that British rule in Ulster was inevitably subject to a higher set of legitimacy tests than was the case for the Irish (as exemplified by the vastly greater protests whenever the RUC would shoot terrorists than when the same act was perpetrated by the Gardai). He says, rather, that he always believed that Northern Ireland’s general position should be determined by the consent principle.³⁸ Other colleagues, such as Peter Bell, say that Thomas’ key conception was that Sinn Fein were lobsters and that the task of British statecraft was to tempt them into lobsterpots.³⁹ At the time, Trimble also believed that attitudes such as those attributed to Thomas did much to explain why the Irish had won ‘hands down’ over the Frameworks. But there was also a bit of useful play-acting in all of this: officials such as Thomas were convenient bogeymen for Unionists, since it was much easier to lay the blame on treacherous advisers rather than the ruler himself. Appealing over the NIO’s head to No. 10 thus became a stock Unionist ploy, and one which would be played even by Trimble – who himself had little faith in the leaders of the modern Conservative party. Sometimes, it even worked, for successive occupants of No. 10 liked to flatter themselves that they could work their magic in ways that mere departmental ministers could not. At other times, the dance might even have been pre-choreographed between No. 10 and the NIO as part of a ‘hard cop, soft cop’ routine: it was sometimes useful to give Unionists the illusion that they were making progress, thus binding them ever more thoroughly into the process.