Editorial Trimble’s tenuous hold

By Anne Cadwallader

The latest setback on the long and bumpy road to a peaceful and lasting political settlement in North Ireland will not be easily overcome. Though there have been attempts to portray Ulster Unionist Party chief David Trimble’s leadership victory at last weekend’s meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council as proof that his support, and, therefore, unionist support for the Good Friday agreement, is still "rock solid," it is clearly anything but.

Trimble earned roughly 56 percent of the vote against a Know-Nothing candidate: a former Orange Order Grand Master, the Rev. Martin Smyth, to whom hardly anyone in the party gave a serious chance of taking more than 30 percent of the delegates’ votes and who campaigned for barely two days.

No matter which lens the result is viewed through, the conclusion is painfully obvious: Trimble has been drastically weakened by the vote and the anti-agreement activists’ position has been strengthened. It marks a further drastic erosion of Trimble’s authority to the point where it is now unlikely, barring a miracle, that he will be able to bring his party with him back into any devolved government in the near future.

Miracles do, of course, happen, but rarely in matters relating to the North’s bitter and divided polity, where things have always tended to be characterized instead by a monotonous predictability. That is why British Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Mandelson’s recent call for the republican movement to help the Unionist leader sounds so naive. Indeed, it is safe to predict that there will be no truck laden with AK-47s leaving Crossmaglen to be left on the doorstep of Unionist Party headquarters in Glengall Street, Belfast.

The weakening of Trimble’s position is not entirely the fault of the IRA, though had it obliged earlier in the year in regard to decommissioning, the current crisis might never have arisen. But by then, too, from the republican position it was already

too late for such a gesture, largely because of Trimble’s tactics since the agreement was signed back in April 1998. His continually going outside the agreement’s terms to do separate deals with his own party’s hardliners had convinced the IRA that he was incapable of dealing with the Unionist rejectionists. The latest result will further encourage that thesis. When Trimble failed to turn back the UUC’s call to link any return to government to the defense of the RUC’s name, which Unionists want the British government to leave unchanged, he then joined with those backing that demand and called for its full support.

From the beginning, Trimble’s appeasement of his own hardliners has only strengthened them at his expense — and at the expense of the Good Friday agreement. After two years, support for the deal in the Unionist community has dwindled to the point that it is now probably backed only by a minority of that community.

The anti-agreement wing has now got Trimble tagged. How will he be able to move outside the narrow area of policy that they have defined — bordered by the demands of "No guns, no government" and, as of last Saturday, "No RUC, no government"?

No wonder Trimble’s main rival for the leadership, Jeffrey Donaldson, was said to have punched the air in triumph when the result of the leadership vote was announced. He smells blood.