Sir, - By any reasonable standard, both John Hume and David Trimble must be credited with a certain political courage for asking, and getting, their respective supporters to accept unpalatable things for the sake of compromise. Yet, in the case of Trimble, this is not enough to meet the exacting standards of Vincent Browne. His attack (Opinion, November 4th) on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Trimble might be dismissed as an exercise in smallmindedness were it not for the curious light it throws on the attitudes of a section of supposedly "constitutional" nationalism.
Browne finds that Trimble, by contrast with Hume, fails on three counts: lack of political courage, failure to advocate solutions, failure to take first steps towards building mutual confidence. To measure up, Trimble apparently must "courageously go to his constituency" and seek support for seating IRA representatives in the Executive - not just in the absence of any decommissioning, or even of a symbolic goodwill gesture in that direction, but in the face of two categorical declarations from the IRA that such a thing will never happen, as well as the continuation of punishment attacks.
Yet Browne must know that for Trimble to follow this advice would mean immediate political death. The wafer-thin majority in the unionist community in favour of the Good Friday Agreement was won on the tentative assumption that decommissioning would start and proceed in tandem with the concessions from the government side. With which Unionist leader would Browne expect nationalists to be dealing after Trimble courageously commits hara-kiri? He should let us know.
Let us apply Browne's criteria to John Hume. To do the equivalent of what Browne is demanding from Trimble, Hume should be going to the IRA and persistently demanding that it decommission. Yet Hume has retreated a long way from the demand that there must be no guns "on the table, under the table or outside the door", through attempting to convince us that the difference between a "complete" ceasefire and a "permanent" one was mere semantics, to his current position in which he seems happy to have IRA representatives in the Executive while the IRA holds on to all its weapons.
In Mr Browne's terms, Hume's failure to confront armed nationalism must count as an abject failure of political courage and a failure to take steps towards building mutual confidence, the very grounds on which the former would deny Trimble the Nobel Prize. It does not seem to occur to Browne to apply his own logic to Hume. That he can so unselfconsciously demand from the other side measures which he would not ask from his own does not bode well for the ability of his brand of nationalism to make peace with unionism.
Some years ago Mr Browne ran a campaign in which he cast doubt on the democratic credentials of the newly formed Democratic Left, on the basis of a suspicion that a small number of Official IRA guns were still in circulation 20 years after the organisation's ceasefire. His fastidiousness in this regard now seems to be thrown to the wind, since he has embraced the idea of a party with a small electoral mandate augmenting its strength with the help of a huge arsenal, and getting into government at that. But then, that was the Republic, this is Northern Ireland: democrats there apparently must work to different rules.
Finally, perhaps Mr Browne can offer a non-threatening interpretation of the following lines from the Martin McGuinness article (The Irish Times, October 29th) not quoted by David Trimble: "But a conflict-resolution process cannot stand still - it is either moving forward or it is moving back. And this process is certainly not moving forward at present. This must be a matter of deep concern for everyone. . .The fact that the guns are not now in use [my italics] is of immense significance. . ." - Yours, etc., Dermot Meleady,
Dublin 3.