DAVID Trimble didn’t like Catholics.
No, wait. The guy is no longer with us and with due regard to the fact that he can’t defend himself it behoves us to be a little more clear and a little more fair. And with due regard also to the fact that Trimble was a lawyer it behoves us further to be cogniscent of the need to give him a fair hearing, even in his absence.
So let me be totally accurate here and restate his case. It is wrong to say that David Trimble didn’t like Catholics. He just didn’t like Catholic lawyers. Or, with another large dollop of caution and a double scoop of reticence, let me say rather that David Trimble didn’t like Catholic lawyers from Lurgan.
Sorry, bear with me. This is getting wearisome, I know, but posterity demands that we get this right. David Trimble didn’t like Catholic lawyers from north Lurgan. That’s it. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as m’learned friends like to say.
We know this because the estimable Sam McBride reported in the Belfast Telegraph on Tuesday that a declassified note had been unearthed in the National Archive at Kew outlining Mr Trimble’s objection to the hearing of a case by a High Court judge who was – altogether now – a Catholic lawyer from north Lurgan. The note – of a meeting between senior UUP figures and Prime Minister Tony Blair in January 2001 – reveals that the then First Minister thought that Mr Justice Kerr was not the right man to hear a Sinn Féin application for a judicial review of his decision not to send ministers to meetings of the North-South Ministerial Council.
Mr Trimble told Mr Blair that he didn’t believe the judge could be impartial in hearing the application because
i) Kerr was sympathetic towards Sinn Féin and
ii) he was a bead-rattler of some renown.
There are those who will view the news of Trimble’s attitude towards a Papist legal colleague with some disappointment, and perhaps even a measure of surprise. For wasn’t Davy the personification of the liberal Prod? Didn’t he win the Nobel Peace Prize for wading through a cloud of incense and candle smoke to embrace John Hume and Gerry Adams? Didn’t he face down the ultimate enemy of Rome, Ian Paisley, in his determination to strike a historic deal?
Well, yes. But that’s not the whole story. The Davy boy was also a close confidant and colleague of the UVF and the UDA during the UWC strike of 1974, providing them with legal advice and meeting daily with them at strike HQ in Hawthornden Street in East Belfast even while the sons of Ulster were stiffing Taigs and planning and carrying out the Dublin-Monaghan atrocities.
TWO WEEKS IN MAY: David Trimble joined forces with the UVF and UDA for the 1974 UWC strike
Fair enough, I hear you cry, but didn’t he more than repent for his sins by the role he played in bringing about the ceasefires some two decades later?
Not really.
Truth is, the awkward truth about the young Trimble’s relationship with the UDA and the UVF was instantly forgotten the moment the British government caved in to the UWC. He never acknowledged that he had literally been on the same side as loyalist paramilitaries during some of the grimmest and bloodiest days of the Troubles because, well... nobody ever asked him.
Nobody ever asked him when or if he parted company with Pliers and Pitbull and the rest of the lads; it was just kind of accepted that his relationship with loyalist killers happened and that it was of its time. Best all round if we proceeded on the convenient if entirely inaccurate basis that Mr Trimble was a man of peace armed with sufficient moral authority to lecture the IRA about the need to stop killing people.
Same thing happened with the DUP 12 years later. With military fanfare and sporting blood-red berets, the DUP launched Ulster Resistance in 1986, a paramilitary group which would go on to import massive amounts of arms that were responsible for a massive uptick in violence and death. At some unidentified point before or after the importation of the assault rifles, pistols, ammunition, rocket launchers and hand grenades we were assured that the DUP had “ended its association” with Ulster Resistance.
Is there any evidence that Ian Paisley and sundry other DUP figures ever actually took off their Ulster Resistance armbands and berets? Did they hand in signed resignations. Do we have any proof of any kind that party figures had removed themselves from the Ulster Resistance leadership while the weapons were being loaded on to a ship in Beirut?
Nope. We have absolutely none. We just kind of took them at their word. The good news for David Trimble was that he wasn’t even asked to give his word. He was just allowed to go on teaching law at Queen’s. Even to Catholic students.
Hell, even to north Lurgan Catholic students.
