February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
As Lord Rogan praised the defeated MP’s courage and spoke of the pressures he, his wife Daphne and children had come under, it proved too much for the usually iron-jawed Trimble.
Perhaps, just perhaps, if the human side of the UUP leader had been more obvious in past years, republicans might have trusted and liked him more, and been more willing to compromise than they were.
The Nobel peace prizewinner, however, can confidently expect to be elevated to the House of Lords, and remains an Ulster Unionist assembly member. But, as former UUP MP Enoch Powell once said, “all political careers end in failure.”
Trimble did not bow out gracefully. He left with a bitter attack on republicans for “failing to honor their commitments” under the Good Friday agreement.
He warned the new Northern Secretary, Peter Hain, that he would be making a grave mistake if he failed to put pressure on the IRA to decommission and disband and he said Ian Paisley’s DUP was incapable of representing unionism.
In a rare acknowledgement of his own faults, he admitted that he might have adopted a tougher stance in negotiations on implementing the agreement but said the “balance sheet” showed a clear credit in his favor.
London and Dublin had both let him down, he said, for giving a “soft” and “comfortable” ride to republicans and for indulging them too long. And, he said, if the IRA announced it was abandoning armed struggle, that must be backed up by the Independent Monitoring Commission.
“If [IRA] statements like that came, then obviously there would be an obligation to respond,” he said, “But that isn’t likely to be the case because I don’t think republicans have yet realized that they will have to disband.”
Reflecting on his time as party leader, he said: “There is no security of tenure in politics. You are at the mercy of the electorate all the time. Ten years is a pretty good innings. I am proud of what we did.
“Rather sadly, my view would be that the unionist electorate are voting for stalemate. Unfortunately they are comfortable with direct rule so they do not have to put up with earache from people they dislike intensely.”
Sinn Fein ministers, he said, had behaved badly. “Their chief offence was their attitude, their complete lack of any acknowledgement of the hurt that republicans had caused, the complete absence of any humility.
“The constant triumphalism of those ministers really did eat into the electorate,” he claimed, declining to give examples when questioned by reporters.
Trimble, who had been known as the “Harry Houdini” of Northern Ireland politics, finally came to grief after his party was decimated in the May 5 election. He had survived so many challenges that most observers almost lost count.
Regarded as a traitor by those even more hardline than himself, he believed what he did in signing the agreement safeguarded the union by getting rid of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, establishing the “principle of consent” and setting up a government at Stormont.
Trimble survived not one, but two, challenges to his leadership at the UUP annual meeting in March 2004. One year on, he was unopposed but his opponents had either defected to the DUP or were lying low. This week they emerged victorious from the long grass.