Pat Leahy: Lessons for Southern politics from the life of David Trimble

David Trimble received a better press after his death this week than he usually did during his political career.

There are understandable reasons for this. At a time when both parts of Ireland were buoyed by a sense of hope and possibility, Trimble often seemed truculent and obstructive, willing to edge unionism forward at a glacial pace, hostile to Dublin and irritated that he had been boxed into a situation where he had to deal with nationalists.

“Well of course the thing about David Trimble,” Gerry Adams once remarked to then northern secretary John Reid, quoted in Dean Godson’s biography of Trimble, “is that he treats everyone like shite”.

With the benefit of hindsight and reviewing the history since, I think it is fairer to say that Trimble strove to bring unionism towards co-operation with nationalism about as quickly as that could be done. If he appeared to Southern eyes as the angry, red-faced leader of unionism, perhaps that was because political unionism was a tribe of angry, red-faced men. But Trimble took on his own side, seeking to lead them to a place many didn’t really want to go. He practised politics as the art of the possible, but also, as Vaclav Havel put it, as the art of the impossible — he made the world a better place.

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Trimble justly received credit for leading Northern unionism into the present accommodation with nationalism,

There are lessons from his experience that could usefully be applied by those in power today. They revolve around four themes — willingness to change, courage, leadership and political skill.

All week, politicians and commentators North and South lined up to pay tribute to the late former first First Minister, as did many in London. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss took time at the beginning of their abysmal BBC debate on Monday to note Trimble’s passing, though it was instructive afterwards that they spent more time discussing Truss’s earrings (£4.50 from Claire’s Accessories, if you must know) than Northern Ireland.

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Trimble justly received credit for leading Northern unionism into the present accommodation with nationalism, enabling the guns to fall silent and the transformation of Northern Ireland politics into something which, if hardly normal by the standards of most democracies, is at least inclusive and based on some sense of shared principles. Northern society remains scarred by the conflict and pockmarked in places by sectarian division. But it is a vastly better place than it was. Douglas Gageby, the Belfast-reared, long-time editor of this newspaper, once lamented that Unionists envied the “tolerance and ease in normal day-to-day life” in the South. Northern Ireland has not yet attained that ease and tolerance, but thanks to Trimble and many others, it has embarked on that road.

Eoghan Harris, who played a significant role in helping him persuade the unionist party organisation, said this week that he saw in Trimble someone who could change. Harris proved a good reader of the man. And while he could hardly bear to be in the same room as the Sinn Féin leaders when the process began, his letter to Martin McGuinness on learning of his last illness (“You reached out to the Unionist community in a way some of them were reluctant to reach out to you”) evidenced grace and statesmanship. He led unionism farther towards compromise than it knew it was willing to go. Once a hardline loyalist who became the leader of inclusive government, he changed and then he changed unionism. Reaching an agreement with Dublin and working with Northern nationalists did not make David Trimble any less of a unionist. But to be willing to change, while still remaining anchored by grounding principles and loyalties, is an example from which our politicians can learn.

There were death threats aplenty and angry mobs of unionists to be navigated

But perhaps Trimble’s greatest example is of his courage and leadership. His courage was not just political — it was physical. There were death threats aplenty and angry mobs of unionists to be navigated. He knew that his political project would probably end, sooner or later, in his ejection but stood firm in the face of Paisley’s deafening, bloodthirsty accusations of lundyism. All leadership requires a certain amount of egotism — and Trimble was not above displaying his intellectual superiority, especially to those on his own side — but it also requires selflessness, too.

[ Mixed feelings about David Trimble among Garvaghy Road residents ]

Trimble combined these qualities with the political nous that was required to move mainstream unionism towards inclusive government. Though his judgment was sometimes suspect, his political skills were considerable. He employed all the dark arts of politics, as well as the brighter ones of flattery, rhetoric, threats, promises and deal-making to keep his party — just about — onside. It’s easy to forget that unionist support for the agreement was always thin enough — just 55 per cent of unionists voted to approve the agreement in the subsequent referendum. Dublin used to grumble about “Saving Private Trimble” but it was, after all, Private Trimble who was in the line of fire. And had he fallen in those early, vital days, it is likely that the entire edifice would have fallen too. Trimble swerved tactically this way and that, but he never abandoned his strategy of reaching a liveable accommodation with nationalism and bringing mainstream unionism with him. He read his own people well enough for long enough for the agreement to bed down.

The lessons from the political life of David Trimble are especially relevant for leaders in Dublin at a time when Irish politics is changing with great rapidity, and when the challenges faced by governments — however, they are constituted — are entirely unpredictable in their scale, scope and nature. Rarely has the future looked more uncertain. Climate change, economic turbulence, global instability, threats to social coherence and the demand for the State to do ever more for its people with finite resources — these are certainties in the times ahead which will test the abilities of whomever we choose to lead us.

They do could worse than reflecting on the life of David Trimble.