Standing in the queue to offer condolences at David Trimble’s funeral, I found myself next to Gerry Adams. There were countless other prominent political mourners there, but the matter-of-fact, prosaic quality of Adams making small talk in a suburban church hall at the funeral of the former leader of Ulster unionism, as if simply waiting to speak to the bereaved family of an old colleague, was striking.
Striking because for a long time the question of whether Trimble or any unionist leader should even be in the same room as Adams or other senior republicans was a topic of tortured debate. As Stephen Walker’s valuable new biography David Trimble: Peacemaker illustrates, the normalisation of Sinn Féin’s status as a purely constitutional political party was one of the central political dilemmas Trimble faced. But not the only one.
Looking back now, it is hard not to admire his courage and the scale of what he undertook: the first, and arguably only, successful act of major political compromise by a unionist leader since Partition. That admiration is only augmented by recent revelations of the scale of private DUP contact with Sinn Féin at precisely the same time Ian Paisley’s party were vilifying Trimble for doing the same thing in public.
But while it is easy to admire Trimble looking back, Walker’s book is honest about how difficult many people found him at the time. He could be abrasive “most of the time”, one of his most senior aides says in an interview for this book. Tony Blair, also interviewed, says “you could never quite tell” what would trigger Trimble’s notorious temper. This intensity was etched in his face, with his red (often reddening as he spoke) cheeks and beady eyes a gift for political cartoonists.
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He was easy to lampoon as the embodiment of hypertense, angry unionism being forced into sharing power. It was more complicated than that. Trimble made no attempt to pretend his job was easy or that he enjoyed glad-handing, but he had a project and a vision. He took on the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party with a desire to break from the inertia of his predecessor James Molyneaux (a figure so pessimistic that he complained the IRA ceasefire was “destabilising”) and a willingness to take risks. “All will become clear,” he corresponded with the historian Ruth Dudley Edwards shortly after he became leader. Quite how high his tolerance for risk was would also become clear.
There is no obvious biographical turning point that directs Trimble into politics. It is recorded that he was born into a lower middle-class family in the seaside town of Bangor, to parents with links to Derry (or, as they called it, Londonderry) and also Co Longford. They were conventionally unionist and unionist voting, but seemingly not deeply political and not involved in Orangeism.
If Trimble’s cleverness is a consistent theme throughout the book, so too is the doggedness which appears to have kept him going during successive professional disappointments. He misses out on studying history at university, and goes into a dreary clerical role in the civil service – but then finds his way to Queen’s University as a part-time law undergraduate and is awarded the only first-class honours in his year, and becomes a law lecturer at the same university. His career at Queen’s is steady but promotions are elusive, and in the 1980s he loses out on several senior roles, including to future Irish president Mary McAleese.
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Throughout, Trimble is engaged in unionist politics. Several sources tell Walker that his stridency harmed his academic progression. In the 1970s he becomes prominent in Vanguard, the sinister breakaway party led by former minister Bill Craig, and is centrally involved in the Ulster Workers’ Council strike. In the 1980s, he chains himself to the gates of Hillsborough Castle in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. In the 1990s, having eventually entered Westminster in middle age, he becomes one of the faces of the first Drumcree Orange parade dispute when he marches gleefully through Portadown holding hands with Paisley.
That image, and his record as a hardliner, helped Trimble win his party’s leadership and convinced much non-unionist opinion that he would be a disaster for the nascent peace process. But just three years later, a new image of Trimble would become seared in the public mind: with John Hume, their hands held aloft by Bono at Waterfront Hall in front of a crowd of young people in what is still the most recognisable visual symbol of reconciliation in modern Irish history. David Kerr, his adviser, said it was worth “more than 100,000 votes” to the Yes campaign in the referendum.
If the high point was 1998 – the year of the Agreement, successful referenda and the Nobel Prize ceremony – the years after were attritional. Trimble desperately tried to mollify his divided party – who had to approve every major decision via a vote at the 1,000-strong Ulster Unionist Council – while securing progress on IRA decommissioning and fending off intensely personal attacks, not least from the DUP. The chronology of those years is exhausting to read and a reminder of how willing Trimble was to place himself in political and sometimes literal harm’s way.
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He applied what his confidant Paul Bew called the “Daphne principle”, the one-step-at-a-time approach to highwire politics coined by Trimble’s universally liked wife. But even some pro-Agreement unionists question whether he might have been better exiting the leadership earlier.
How and why did he get from hardliner to reconciler? The person whom McAleese describes as “nakedly sectarian” in the early 1970s but then embraced her in a Donegal church at the funeral of children killed in the Omagh bomb. This book doesn’t attempt a deep psychological explanation, but it offers a reminder of the scale of Trimble’s achievement.
It is a journalist’s biography rather than a historian’s, but perhaps the better for it. Using interviews with many sources, former BBC reporter Walker creates a textured, human portrayal of a man who was alternately extremely rude and kind; pedantic but possessed of long-term vision; frequently publicly humiliated but ultimately vindicated.
Trimble loved opera. If at times he appeared like comic relief from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the pompous martinet repeatedly brought low, something more heroic was stirring underneath. Just a few doors from Belfast’s Grand Opera House is the site of the old Official Unionist headquarters on Glengall Street. It was a regular backdrop on bleak TV news during the Trimble era, with tense party meetings and sometimes angry protests.
The office is long gone, but a few steps away is the shiny new Grand Central train station. I was there a few weeks ago on a sunny summer’s evening, with a pleasant stream of people walking down Glengall Street, arriving from, or going to, Dublin for the night. Many of them born after Trimble left politics, they chatted amiably about their plans for the evening, not thinking about the dark opera of a generation ago, or the role of the strange, introverted man who emerged as one of its great heroes.
Matthew O’Toole is an SDLP MLA and Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly
