The death of David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to the power-sharing deal in Northern Ireland in 1998, is one of those moments when the parentheses close on an era of history.
When Trimble started in politics, few questioned the Unionist hegemony in the province. The Ulster Unionist Party, of which he became the leader in 1995, had been comfortably in charge since the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921. Its ascendancy was as much cultural as political, resting on the support of landowners and grandees. Trimble was the first UUP leader to have a university degree.
By the time he died last week, Sinn Fein, the political expression of Irish republican terrorism, was the single largest party in Northern Ireland, and the UUP was fourth, with just 11% of the vote.
I have American friends who see this switch as an overdue decolonization. In their version, Trimble and his tribe are planters who maintained their position through repression and are now being undone by demographic change. Trimble might get some brownie points for easing the transition, but he continues to be seen as having been on the wrong side of history, vainly resisting Irish unity.
Trimble loathed that caricature. He especially disliked being compared to F.W. de Klerk, the last leader of apartheid South Africa. If anything, he used to say, he was the Mandela of the parallel, persuading Northern Ireland’s majority to share power peacefully with the minority.
Making that case ended his career. Unionist voters were, by and large, happy enough to accept that the peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland meant a measure of artificial power-sharing since strict majority rule would have left nationalist parties with no voice. What they were not prepared to stomach was the dismantling of the police and the release of terrorist prisoners, even as paramilitary groups have continued to engage in racketeering, drug-running, and mob violence.
Trimble, who had himself been elected as a hard-liner, saw his party displaced by the much more aggressive Democratic Unionist Party, which went on, paradoxically, to operate the power-sharing deal that it had spent 30 years warning against.
This was all proof, to supporters of a 32-county Irish republic, of the inevitability of their cause. Indeed, inevitability (in a vague, meme-like way) is their strongest card. The case for a united Ireland is rarely made in economic terms — and for a good reason. Though there are arguments for harmonizing taxes and standards on the two sides of the border, the same arguments apply more strongly to harmonization between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Nationalists have traditionally made their case in cultural terms, but this brings a peculiar difficulty. The texture of daily life in Ireland is similar to that in the U.K. People dress the same way, eat the same cuisine, watch the same television, follow the same soccer teams, and, in general, are intermarried and intermingled. There are, of course, handsome and distinctive features of Irish culture. But successive nationalist leaders, down the years, have tended to define their nationality in largely negative terms. Being Irish meant not being British. It meant refusing to join the Allies in 1939, rejecting NATO, and condoning the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri’s fascist junta. It meant, until very recently, failing to acknowledge the Irish volunteers who had fought as service members in the two world wars. It meant, for Ireland’s Eamon de Valera, an autarkic and Gaelic-speaking state. Trimble used to observe that Irish nationalism was based on anti-Britishness. Take that away, he would say, and surprisingly little would remain.
Whenever a choice had to be made between seeking to accommodate the million-odd Brits on the island and emphasizing Ireland’s separateness, Irish nationalists opted for the second, even when that meant leaving the Commonwealth and making the Irish language compulsory for certain state offices.
These are legitimate choices, but they might have been deliberately designed to alienate a large British minority of Ireland’s overall population — people of whom de Valera said as late as 1962: “If in the north there are people who spiritually want to be English rather than Irish, they can go, and we will see that they get the adequate compensation for their property.”
Trimble’s achievement was to find an accommodation with that tradition. But accommodation does not mean annexation. Some commentators are so conditioned to see the conflict as an anti-colonial struggle that they miss the reality. Dublin, unlike London, is not neutral on the status of Northern Ireland. It actively favors absorption, but it is not prepared to countenance a closer political association with the U.K. as a quid pro quo. This is why unionism, if not the UUP that used to be its vehicle, remains as strong as ever.
