Confident Trimble shows how to lead

The decks were cleared at the weekend for the final phase of the Mitchell review. His party's annual conference gave David Trimble the nod to follow his own counsel on how to break the political logjam. His internal enemies haven't gone away, you know, but they were very subdued in Enniskillen on Saturday.

After Mr Trimble's persuasive performance in front of 500 Ulster Unionist Party delegates, the political landscape ahead became much clearer. There will be sideshows and smokescreens and much posturing and manoeuvring in the last weeks of the Mitchell review but, as ever, it's still about guns and government.

UUP annual conferences are often tense but generally dull affairs. But this was riveting. Mr Trimble delivered a confident, strong speech in which he confronted his critics, while commentator and polemicist Eoghan Harris provided the pyrotechnics with, and this is important, the say-so of Mr Trimble.

"He's going to have a heart attack," said Ken Maginnis at the back of the hall, while on the rostrum Mr Harris ranted and raged at the delegates during a debate on media perceptions of unionism. But there was control in Mr Harris's passion.

He thundered that, contrary to the view of unionism, there was a "seismic shift" in republican thinking. The UUP should go into government with Sinn Fein without IRA decommissioning. Why should the UUP be so arrogant as to take on the responsibility of trying to do what the RUC, the British army, the Garda Siochana, the SAS couldn't do: disarm the IRA?

This would turn the responsibility for disarmament back on to Gerry Adams, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, and John Hume and give the UUP the high moral ground. "You are in the business of making peace, of making a historic accommodation (with republicanism) and thus securing the union. Look, Sinn Fein fought for 30 years. It's like a kid wanting a bike for Christmas. The bike they wanted was a united Ireland. They didn't get the bike. Please give them a few stickers," he declared.

This, coming from a commentator they know to be a friend of unionism, seemed to jolt delegates. There were mutterings of annoyance, but most of the delegates listened intently. Whether Mr Harris won any converts to his analysis is questionable, but he certainly electrified the conference and made unionists aware that hard choices have to be made, one way or the other.

Mr Trimble, who invited Mr Harris to address the conference, would have had a good idea of the line the commentator would take because, it is understood, it corresponds with Mr Harris's argument when he addressed the Assembly party two weeks ago in Scotland.

So, as if he were taking a leaf from the book on liberation theology, was this Mr Trimble engaging in the "conscienceisation" of his party? Was he, through an evolutionary process, and using other messengers, preparing unionism for the "historic compromise" to which Mr Harris referred?

No one is suggesting that Mr Trimble wants to go into government without any pledges on IRA decommissioning, but on Saturday he seemed to be telling unionism that the UUP must provide some slack around the notion of sequencing.

"To me `jump together' or 'choreography' or 'sequencing' all refer to the same thing - making sure that devolution is accompanied by decommissioning," he stated. The key word here is "accompanied", again offering up the possibility of government before guns, as long as guns come shortly after.

Mr Trimble in his speech exhibited determination and some flexibility. He was accorded a standing ovation at the start of his speech and at the end. He was applauded when he challenged his critics, internal and external, to provide an alternative to the Belfast Agreement.

He stood up for the Good Friday accord and insisted he wasn't for resigning. "I will not lead this party into a never-never land of false hope or imitation-Carsons without the gritty realism of James Craig," he said, in an obvious swipe at the anti-agreement factions inside and outside his party.

"If you feel the need to make public attacks, attack republicans, not Ulster Unionists," he added. Again the targets here are apparent. The anti-agreement bloc had a platform to challenge Mr Trimble, or to tie his hands on future negotiations, but it didn't do it.

David Brewster, an honorary secretary of the UUP, portrayed the Belfast Agreement as in its death throes, and tentatively said the party would not "tolerate" a compromise on decommissioning. But his criticism was more oblique than overt. Something fiercer would have been necessary to rattle Mr Trimble or the Yes camp.

THERE was a degree of stage management to the conference, but if anti-agreement heavyweights like Jeffrey Donaldson, William Ross or William Thompson wanted to have a go, they could have had their say on Saturday. They kept quiet.

This is not to say that, come the day when Mr Trimble may have to make that historic compromise with republicanism, the No side won't bare its fangs. Still, it was a pussycat, not a tiger, on Saturday. The ghost of Brian Faulkner was absent in Enniskillen. The destructive, divisive mood of 1973 and 1974 and Sunningdale has not yet surfaced. Mr Trimble is still the leader and - a man often criticised for not directing from the front - he did some leading on Saturday.

George Mitchell returns to Belfast tomorrow and to London on Wednesday to resume his efforts at finding some middle ground between Sinn Fein's and the Ulster Unionist Party's well-rehearsed positions on IRA decommissioning and the formation of an executive.

Talk is that if a deal is not done by the end of October or by early to mid-November, Senator Mitchell will decamp to the US and Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair will be left with another political vacuum in Northern Ireland, and all the dangers that that entails.

We know Mr Trimble is still wedded to the idea of sequencing, i.e. if the IRA makes a commitment to disarm by May 2000 he would probably sit with Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun in an executive - provided that product was delivered shortly after. So it could be guns before government. That's the UUP compromise.

We are assured by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that they want to see IRA decommissioning, and that they want the Belfast Agreement to work. In July they published a paper interpreted by the British and Irish governments and the pro-agreement parties, apart from the UUP, as a pledge that with Sinn Fein in government IRA decommissioning would quickly follow.

One would reasonably expect the republican movement would at least return to that position in these final negotiations. They may see merit in the sequencing idea, but the stumbling block is the demand for an IRA "commitment". For republicans that is tantamount to "surrender". And No Surrender is just as important in the republican psyche as it is in the unionist psyche.

How to find a formula that guarantees unionism that IRA disarmament will follow from the formation of an executive, with republicans equally able to state they did not capitulate, is the challenge for Senator Mitchell and the British governments in this short period ahead.

It's difficult, and it may not even be possible - a Sunday Times survey of 100 delegates showing a majority now opposed to the agreement points to the hurdles ahead - but as one senior unionist said yesterday: "The game is still on."