Fourthwrite .......................Issue No. 9

What Trimble fears

by John Nixon

When David Trimble and Ian Paisley backed by thousands of armed unionist RUC men and British Army marched triumphantly down the nationalist Garvaghy Road the most abiding memory of the event was not the TV pictures of dour faced Orange bigots that hit TV screens around the world, it was that little triumphalist jig outside Carlton Street Orange Hall. The fact that it costs the Northern Ireland tourist industry £250 million a year mattered little to them.  It was not the image of the Nobel Peace prizewinner, not the populist crusader for peace on stage with Bono and U2 that will forever epitomise the essence of the man in the nationalist mind.  It was that little Irish (or Ulster-Scots?) jig .  That event provided a real but not rare insight to the complex personal and political nature of David Trimble.

This was not a case of playing to the Unionist gallery as was his gross insult on the nature of society in the south, which he described as a sectarian mono-ethnic mono-cultural state. This was Trimble the strategist reconciling himself to middle Unionism who in turn could see immediately that his remarks were intended not as a truism but as a defiant gesture to the reality that whether they like it or not, thing have changed and the pace of change is steadily increasing. It is no surprise to anyone that among those who rallied to defend the South were the political and religious leaders of the Protestant community in the 26-Counties. They are doing very well thank you and don't want to hear such diatribe coming from a Unionist Nobel Peace prize winner.  Trimble's statement had the desired impact and evoked the inevitable reaction. It was not a stale version of DUP gimmickry.

Ultimately, Trimble's remarks say more about the complex personal nature of the man. The outburst vastly undermines his credibility as a serious politician but it goes much deeper than that; it is borne out of deep-rooted inner fears. It is the manifestation of a fear that says yes, I know change is here, I know more change is on the way but I will say anything and do everything to stifle that change because it does not represent progress to me. Such fears can be exploited and manipulated because they make people feel vulnerable and while Trimble's Waterfront audience is not made up of low-skilled, unemployed and disaffected working class people from the Lower Shankill or Ballybean, they do comprise a section of unionism who know and understand better than most that weak links are appearing in a chain that bound them to the halcyon days of Unionist domination.  Any Houdini could break it.