THAT Sinn Féin did well out of a ‘peace process’ many republicans feared and disliked is beyond argument. This long afterwards, the state of the parties involved in pre-1998 negotiations is odd.
The only other party which can look back to those months and years and compare its position today with any pleasure is Alliance. Of today’s leaders, Naomi Long has most local respect.
Alliance sits on top of expectations – faint as they are – of a Stormont renewal, perhaps precariously but attracting most interest. That has as much to do with the emergence at last of what may be an enduring middle ground as it has with Long, valiant against ill-health and strong-minded battler with misogyny though she is.
Gerry Adams was feted, became a global figure, retained trust and support and affection of republican voters through the first years after the Good Friday Agreement. He is sole survivor now of the dominant northerners most closely involved, but well outside frontline politics.
It was obvious enough at the time, and became rapidly undeniable, that the two parties at the forefront of negotiations on whose relationship the new structures would depend would suffer. Ulster Unionism and the SDLP duly suffered.
To relegate a tired and ageing SDLP, Sinn Féin only needed to be seen to have made the argument for politics over violence. Voters won over by the Adams-Martin McGuinness show arrived gradually, then suddenly. There has been no steady, consistent SDLP way back.
Fault, blame? The part political leadership plays is hard to judge ‘in the moment’. The awfulness of Truss/Sunak on top of Johnson and dispiriting spectacles across the globe almost exhaust interest in what current politics demands of leadership, or appears to demand.
Many revered in later life have spent middle years fighting off rivals, with backbiters collecting tales of personal or professional shortcomings. Applause from the world outside and often enough from inside as well, including accurate assessment, tends to start only when the end is nigh, or when it is announced.
Tributes when David Trimble died last week did not neglect his right-wing background and mostly agreed on the abuse he took for signing up the Ulster Unionists.
There is also agreement now that his leadership moved unionism on in a way that lured the DUP into a supposedly power-sharing Stormont – and that his prickly personality made his efforts less appreciated at the time.
He had a lot to be prickly about, though it also came naturally. He won his Nobel for delivering the 1998 agreement, but it finished his career. He was up against majority unionist opinion with a ramshackle party around him full of malcontents, nonentities and enemies.
Ulster Unionism did not want to negotiate. Selling power-sharing with nationalism, never mind a form that included the IRA, was not possible then and has never been seriously tried since. The very idea of a ‘process’ raised hackles, no final ‘settlement’, signing up betokening further negotiation. The Reverend Ian Paisley and the now forgotten Bob McCartney were a raucous duo outside the tent.
Some reflect now that it was a Trimble victory to set up structures that eventually lured in Paisley and the DUP, though many think they came in effect to obstruct.
Having harried unionist leaders out of compromise for half a century, Paisley was able to front up a deal with Sinn Féin because no Paisley loomed behind him. By the time of the cheesy posing with Martin McGuinness he was merely a figurehead.
The death of David Trimble exercised minds all round; me too. Writing too close to events for perspective, what looked like self-centredness and plain bad manners obscured the problems he faced.
He knew unionism must deal but hated the compromise necessary, I judged, so his clumsiness and awkwardness was outward sign of war between head versus stomach.
Not enough appreciation there of what was courage as well as mulishness. RIP David Trimble.
