The Politics of the Greatest Atrocity

The Humanising of David Trimble.  By Fionnuala O Connor

If the road towards peace becomes straighter and smoother in time, no one looking back can ignore how tragedy reshaped this summer. Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams look strengthened by the outcome of Omagh. The psychology is simpler than the politics: one should feed the other. But an altered David Trimble may still need more than can be given at this point, by the organisation Gerry Adams has helped change in tune with himself and the community he comes from.

There are signs that Trimble has at last begun to feel loyalty to a process, which has stumbled on through so many violent deaths and which Adams must find poignant, though hardly unexpected. Inside republicanism, the greatest deterrent for years to abandoning violence as an integral part of ‘the struggle' was consideration of the Troubles as dead. As a prominent Sinn Féiner at the time once confided: “How do we justify all those deaths if we end the armed struggle short of our demands?” Adams and his allies found a way round that dilemma.

Trimble has begun to sound changed by his own experience since the Agreement, especially since becoming First Minister. Although he shows a new assurance, he will still face an alliance inside the new Assembly, of the Reverend Ian Paisley's DUP and the UK Unionist Bob McCartney. He knows that they hope to detach a half-dozen ‘wobblies' within his own Assembly party. The combination would make him a lame duck leader, though pro-Agreement members would still have a working Assembly majority.

The first big test is the establishment of a shadow executive to ready the Assembly for devolution of a range of powers next February. The executive should be installed in the next month, complete with two Sinn Féin ministers—still a potent unionist bugbear and until very recently

Trimble himself seemed entirely unready for the prospect. His own advocacy of the Agreement is full of reservations. He has yet to talk directly to Adams. But over a week filled with funerals and accounts of dreadful grief—which the bulk of Northern Ireland's divided population seemed to share equally for the first time in nearly thirty years of violence—the Ulster Unionist and Sinn Féin leaders sounded as though they were working, at a distance, towards a relationship.

The Trimble strategy, in so far as one exists, has depended on a greater force bouncing him from stage to stage, during which he rationalises on the hoof and largely ignores his demoralised party. The contrast with the tight organisation and committee-written party line of Sinn Féin could not be greater. It can also be misleading.

One republican insider says outsiders do Adams and Co. too much credit. “It's not that tied down. Half the time they're winging it, doing the best they can.” The same person doubted if Adams could dispose of weapons even if he wanted to: “All those guns in Protestant hands and Unionists insist the ‘Rah' hand theirs over? A couple of months after Drumcree? Come on. I don't know when Adams will be able to sell that idea.” But the memory lingers of a prominent Sinn Féin member leering cheerfully, having first given the standard lecture on the impossibility of any weaponry being handed over at any time, not a bullet etc: “You know us,” he said. “We'll do whatever we have to.”

In the aftermath of Omagh, Gerry Adams broke another taboo. A short statement in his name “condemned” the bombing, “without equivocation.” Martin McGuinness was interviewed shortly afterwards and asked to repeat the ‘c' word. Practised Shinner-watchers reckoned McGuinness didn't know Adams had already said it. In any case, he didn't follow suit.

But McGuinness openly welcomed the collapse of the Real IRA/32 County Sovereignty Committee. The argument continues about the effect on Adams and Co., though many nationalists seem agreed they must surely be less constrained now by fear of support seeping away to the Last Ditchers.

The short answer is that there may be no second chance for a “Real IRA” but what Adams and Co. can offer to reassure unionists is no clearer—perhaps because they don't know themselves. On the other hand, it was clear that republicans delighted in denouncing for the first time, instead of being denounced. A young County Tyrone Sinn Fein Assemblyman, Barry McElduff, put it well to a Dublin journalist after one of the funerals: “The most comforting thing in all this sorry business is that I can come in among these families as a republican to share their grief and be warmly received.”

A swathe of opinion in the aftermath of Omagh clearly differentiated between republicanism as presently led by Adams and that of the bombers. Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair and a section of unionist public opinion made plain that they believed the SF leader's unprecedented condemnation was genuine. David Trimble withheld approval in public. But he also refrained from suggesting as in the past that the Omagh bombers were the Provos' licensed surrogates. Anti-Agreement Unionists were less astute. Peter Robinson's early demand for the border to be sealed—a DUP staple for decades—had the same ring of bitter outdatedness as the title “32 County Sovereignty Committee.” One bereaved relative said on radio that some politicians were grave-dancing. He went on to say he hoped, as did others bereaved, that the carnage might spur efforts to make the Agreement work. The Antis went quiet.

Trimble himself showed movement over successive days. His first comment was the harshest, a judgement that Omagh would not have happened if arms had been handed in. But that was delivered down a phone in London, after a punishing drive through Europe to get home fast with his family from their interrupted holiday. A few days later Trimble made his own grand gesture. In one remarkable day, he went first to Buncrana to the funeral of the Donegal children killed at Omagh, then back to Omagh to see a veteran local UU official buried with his son, and finally to Dublin to meet Bertie Ahern. The day ended with him emerging from the Cabinet room to tell the media he was ‘satisfied' with the emergency measures Bertie had outlined.

In Buncrana, the Bishop of Derry noted Trimble's presence in the congregation, with his deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon, President McAleese and John Hume among others. The bishop wished Trimble well from the altar. The congregation applauded. For an Orangeman bidden by the Order's rules not to enter a Catholic Church, mere presence at a Mass must have been an experience, perhaps a personal milestone. When the little Quinn boys died, Trimble visited the family but did not accompany Mallon to the funeral Mass, depriving a torn Northern Ireland of a powerful symbol.

The aftermath of Omagh saw Trimble grow. Interviews with the BBC and UTV on the eve of the memorial service on August 22 showed him calm and even magnanimous. In place of the old carping at Adams came a reasonable request. He wasn't speaking to Sinn Féin in a challenging way. He wouldn't put words in their mouths, but there must have been ways to do this. People needed to be convinced that the IRA's violence was at an end.

Trimble must have been sustained by popular feedback, probably drawn from the airwaves rather than his disparate party. For a week, people devoured TV and radio coverage of Omagh, distraught but compelled to watch funeral after funeral, soaking up accounts by witnesses, nurses and police. Radio Ulster programmes were swamped by callers—many from Omagh—expressing fury, grief and determination that the bombers should not “wreck the chance of peace” with a whole-heartedness usually precluded by the traditional need to make or refute sectarian points.

Like many others previously, this atrocity hurt Catholics as well as Protestants. But this time neither blamed the other community. There were no doubts that the bomb was directed against the fledgling settlement, the new majority who voted for the Agreement.
In private conversations, as on the air, people supposed that this felt like the worst atrocity of the Troubles. This was partly because the May 1974 bombings, which killed 33 in Dublin and Monaghan, had always been curiously downplayed and partly because the taste for peace had grown to the point where even the INLA recognised that no justification remained for violence.

But there was also a feeling that “they bombed us all.” People said it repeatedly, in one way or another: “they'll not break the Agreement, they can't be let. It would be an insult to Omagh's dead and maimed and broken-hearted.” A dry political compromise has developed a life of its own. Consideration of the play between personalities and parties is all very well. It neglects the emergence of a steely popular will to protect the progress made so painfully; the delight that the ill-wishers are now fewer, or weaker; the determination that everyone involved should find a way round whatever difficulty comes next.