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David
Trimble is like the persona we sometimes assume in
bad dreams - running through quagmire to escape something
malign. While our legs might just manage to shake
off the torpor sufficiently to keep a pace ahead of
whatever is snapping and snarling at our heels, it
never provides enough respite in which to sit down
unafraid of being devoured.
This
month's UUC gathering flagged up the existence of
more storm clouds than Trimble has faced since the
leadership challenge from Martin Smyth just over two
years ago. His threat to garrotte the institutions,
against his better judgement, has once more enhanced
his position within republican demonology. His government
colleague, Martin McGuinness, has dismissed him as
little other than a front for the ‘rejectionists’
while Mitchel McLaughlin has accused him of political
cowardice. Calculatingly more polemical than penetrative
on the part of Sinn Fein.
Trimble’s
grudging venture into the lair of the unionist anti-agreement
camp with a reverse gear at times seemingly beyond
his reach is being given forward momentum by some
of his key allies in the Assembly - arguably his power
base within the UUP - either resigning or being deselected.
As an Assembly election looms in the spring of next
year, Bertie Kerr's decision, in particular, to jump
ship has merely accentuated a belief that the party
leader is out of touch with unionist grassroots opinion.
Whether
Trimble has sufficiently sold the Agreement up to
now is a moot point. But he can hardly sell it in
the manner Sinn Fein demand without calling into being
a strengthened unionist challenge to it, which in
turn limits his ability to sell it at all. Paradoxically,
it is by underselling it that he has managed to sell
it for as long as he has.
Nevertheless,
the nationalist electorate want Sinn Fein in government
regardless of unionist concerns. And who are the unionists
to tell that electorate otherwise? Do they expect
a double veto, firstly over the constitutional question
- which they have already - and also over the form
in which partition is to manifest itself within the
North? There is no just reason for the British Government
to collapse the institutions at the behest of unionism.
At
the same time the unionists would not be disenfranchising
the nationalist electorate by refusing to sit in a
functioning government with those whom nationalists
elect. The nationalist electorate cannot compel unionist
politicians to sit in government with Sinn Fein when
the unionist electorate believe - with no small measure
of hypocritical cant - a report by the Times that
there is now a majority of Army council members who
are also Sinn Fein elected representatives.
In
a situation where unionism was to withdraw from government
and not demand that the British collapse the institutions
and the British in turn were to go as far as to allow
all the ministerial portfolios to be filled by nationalists,
what sort of executive would it be? What possible
basis in consent would it have? Furthermore, there
must exist in the midst of British strategic thinking
a strand pulsating with memories of 1974. And with
unionist anger simmering, the British are likely to
want to ensure it does not reach the point of a raging
boil. If the British waive any claim to a right to
move against the institutions, Sinn Fein might face
up to the weakness of its own strategy, and along
with the SDLP de facto take the onerous decision to
suspend them anyway - dressed up as magnanimity and
an act of inclusiveness - rather than face the instability
that would ensue from them functioning as ‘ourselves
alone’ bodies.
In
all of this, it is hardly fanciful to believe that
Trimble does not want to destroy the Agreement but
is having his ability to drive it thwarted by a grassroots
unionist belief that the IRA remains active. Thinking
republicans presumably ask themselves if the IRA were
to be removed from the equation would there be a crisis
at all? Despite republican assertions to the contrary,
it is far from clear that all the anti-agreement figures
can be labelled as not wanting a Catholic about the
place. Is that the position of someone like Arlene
Foster? Hardly likely. It is the IRA they seem not to
want about the place.
Despite
wishing to play down any link there is a strong implicit
acceptance on the part of Sinn Fein that the continuation
of IRA activity has a bearing on the stability of
the institutions. If the party genuinely believed
otherwise it would cease to deny IRA involvement in
some activities. Likewise the IRA would accept responsibility
for its actions. But therein lies the rub. The appearance
of IRA spawned unionist turmoil helps Sinn Fein sell
its strategy within its own constituency.
Nevertheless,
because ministerial positions are more important than
the IRA and because the Sinn Fein leadership could
quite easily wrap up the IRA in the morning the inexorable
logic is one of moving towards a trade-off where the
IRA, like its guns, is little other than a disposable
Sinn Fein bargaining chip facing disbandment in the
South and being pulled back into Sinn Fein in the
North as a form of IRB-cum-Praetorian guard. And who
then expects unionists to complain long and hard if
the only object of IRA force is recalcitrant or awkward
republicans?
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