The final Agreement allowed Trimble to claim that the Union was not only safe but actually stronger because of unionist negotiating successes in strand two and on constitutional recognition. Unionist focus on strand-two issues during the final days of the negotiations had got a result: the North–South ministerial council and its cut-down list of ‘implementation bodies’ in areas including animal and plant health and teacher qualifications were difficult for either republicans or unionist rejectionists to portray as ‘creeping reunification’. For the first time an Irish government had committed itself to the constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland through the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution, and all signatories of the Agreement were committed to accepting the principle of consent.
But the strong belief of the two governments and the SDLP that republicans were essential to any final settlement inevitably meant that unionists would have to pay a price for these victories. On devolution itself there was little attempt to defend the original UUP position of administrative devolution, with committee chairs allocated by the d'Hondt rule a mathematical device usually used for the allocation of seats in legislatures under the additional-member system of proportional representation. The SDLP demand was for a power-sharing cabinet. Republicans still ideologically opposed to devolution had made no contribution to the negotiations in this area while of course demanding ‘inclusion’ in whatever structures eventuated. The result was described by Robin Wilson: ‘Rather like the camel that emerged from a committee designing a horse, a power-sharing executive with positions distributed by d'Hondt was the outcome.’81
The lacuna in the Agreement that was to cause Trimble and his party so much subsequent grief was the failure to make Sinn Féin's participation in the Executive dependent on prior action by the IRA in decommissioning its weapons. It was on this issue that Trimble faced a rebellion from members of the UUP's talks team on the final afternoon of the negotiations. Faced by Blair's insistence that the Agreement could not be altered and after a phone-call from Clinton, Trimble extracted a letter of reassurance from Blair. The letter expressed sympathy with the UUP's concerns and promised that if within six months the Agreement proved unsatisfactory in dealing with this issue, the British government would support changes to the Agreement.82 But, as Frank Millar notes, ‘Most people at the time thought, and still think, that the letter was no more than a last-minute attempt to cover Trimble's embarrassment and was otherwise of no value or significance.’83 It did prove sufficient to win over most of the doubters as the talks neared their conclusion, with the important exception of Jeffrey Donaldson, Molyneaux's successor as MP for Lagan Valley. Ambiguity on the issue of decommissioning was part of the price that unionists had to pay to allow republicanism a soft landing, given that, as one of their leading strategists admitted, the Agreement had legitimized the British state in Ireland.84 Another last-minute concession to republican unhappiness with the North–South and constitutional dimensions of the deal was the reduction of the period – from three years to two – before which prisoners belonging to paramilitary groups on ceasefire would be released. This, and what Sinn Féin referred to as the ‘Equality Agenda’ – involving human rights legislation and safeguards, commissions on policing and criminal justice, and a British commitment to demilitarization – were to act as consolation for what a considerable number of republicans considered an Agreement that enshrined the ‘unionist veto’.
These were the issues that dominated the intra-unionist debate on the Agreement in the period leading up to the two referenda on 20 May through which the northern and southern electorates were to express a judgement on what had been agreed on Good Friday. It soon became clear that while nationalists and republicans overwhelmingly supported the deal, unionists were split. At first roughly half were in favour, a quarter against and a quarter undecided. In the weeks leading up to the referendum in Northern Ireland attention focused not on the constitutional aspects of the deal and Trimble's success on domesticating the North–South institutions but on the more emotive issues of early prisoner releases, the presence of ‘terrorists’ in government, and the supposed threat to the future of the RUC. Unionist rejectionists benefited from the spectacle of the triumphal reception given at a special Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis to recently released IRA men who had been involved in bombings and kidnappings in London in the 1970s. The choreography of this event was staged to give the imprimatur of those who suffered two decades of imprisonment for the ‘struggle’ to a radically revisionist republican strategy. But it produced a wave of repulsion in the unionist community and threatened major damage to the pro-Agreement cause.
That just over a half of unionists did vote ‘yes’ in the referendum was in large part the product of frequent trips to the North during the last two weeks of the campaign by Blair, who gave numerous reassurances, particularly on the issue of decommissioning. He was backed up by a cavalcade of British political leaders and international figures, including Nelson Mandela. A strong sense of the ‘historic’ nature of the choice on offer was also encouraged by the unprecedented attention of the international media and by a heavily funded ‘yes’ campaign that could rely on the support of Saatchi & Saatchi and even teamed up the staid, besuited and middle-aged figures of Trimble and Hume with the Irish band U2 and the northern group Ash at a rock concert in Belfast in the final days of the campaign.
The result was the mobilization of the Protestant ‘comfortable classes’ in an unprecedented fashion. Turnout at 81 per cent (in the Republic it was a mere 56 per cent) was the highest ever in Northern Ireland: 160,000 more than had voted in the last Westminster election.85 This surge was disproportionately drawn from the majority unionist areas east of the Bann, where turnout was traditionally the lowest in the North. Thus, although the 71 per cent ‘yes’ vote gave the Agreement a strong boost, its basis in the unionist community was shaky. As a leading member of the DUP put it of those who had broken a habit of a lifetime: ‘They came out to vote for what they saw as peace and now they will return to political hibernation for another 30 years. But those who voted “No” are not so apathetic.’86
The DUP man's prediction appeared vindicated at the election for the new Northern Ireland Assembly on 25 June. Many of those unionists who had voted ‘yes’ in May now stayed at home, and Trimble's party turned in its worst-ever performance, taking 21.3 per cent of the first-preference vote to the DUP's 18 per cent. Although pro-Agreement parties won 73 per cent of the vote and eighty of the Assembly's 108 seats, there was no disguising the precarious nature of unionist support in the Assembly, where pro-Agreement unionists held thirty seats while the ‘antis’ had twenty-eight. Nationalist and republican concern with the supposed danger of a unionist majority abusing its position had led to mechanisms for cross-community validation on key decisions that required, at minimum, the support of 40 per cent of each communal bloc. This was now an ever-present threat to pro-Agreement unionism.
Movement on the arms issue by the IRA would have given a substantial boost to Trimble's position in his party and in the wider unionist community. Such movement seemed possible, as Sinn Féin's political successes were seen as giving Adams increased leverage with the IRA. The Assembly elections had been a major victory for Adams's pan-nationalist strategy. The SDLP topped the poll with 22 per cent, and the aggregate vote of the nationalist–republican bloc was at its highest ever, with a Sinn Féin vote of 17.7 per cent. The peace process had put Adams and Martin McGuinness at the centre of national and international attention. Received respectfully in Downing Street, Leinster House and the White House, they were listened to deferentially when they continued to complain of being marginalized. They had before them the heady vision of being the first transnational party in the European Union with seats in the Dáil, Stormont and Westminster and the possibility of being in government in both Belfast and Dublin.
If the massive political benefits of flexibility, compromise and realpolitik were obvious, the dire futility of a return to the arm
ed struggle was made abysmally clear on 15 August in Omagh when twenty-eight people were murdered in a Real IRA car-bomb attack. This was the largest loss of life in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. In the words of one former IRA hunger striker, Omagh was ‘the end of an era for a certain school of republican thought. What little sympathy was remaining for the physical force element evaporated on that dreadful Saturday afternoon.’87 The Omagh atrocity offered the leadership of the republican movement the best possible conditions to address the arms issue. However, nothing was done for another year and a half, by which time Trimble's position was substantially weaker within his party and the electorate.
In part this reflected Adams's long-standing caution in edging the movement in a more flexible and political direction while doing his utmost to prevent a split. It was also the case that the substantively partitionist nature of the deal that republicans had accepted made action on arms more difficult: giving ground on political fundamentals made even a gesture on arms more difficult to sell within the IRA. There was also a major obstacle in the strong element of solipsistic self-righteousness so strongly developed in the republican mentality. Republican violence was from this perspective a legitimate response to state and loyalist violence. This was despite the fact that of the 3,633 violent deaths during the ‘Troubles’, republicans were responsible for 2,139, or 58.8 per cent of the total. In comparison the reviled RUC, the disbandment of which Sinn Féin put near the top of its post-Agreement demands, was responsible for fifty-two deaths.88 Only a tiny element of the most sophisticated in the leadership would even hint at the possibility that the armed struggle had made an independent and powerful contribution to making Northern Ireland in 1998 more polarized, more segregated and more embittered than it was thirty years before. From this perspective the ceasefire was the fundamental concession made by the IRA, and pressure for it to move on decommissioning was an attempt to ‘humiliate’ an ‘undefeated army’.
Adams had recognized that most unionists ‘quite rightly’ would not feel any gratitude towards the IRA. He gave his own version of unionist thinking on the issue: ‘We are not thanking these people for stopping what they should never have done in the first place.’ Yet he did expect an understanding from unionists that any action on weapons would wait until all the aspects of the Agreement had been implemented, particularly the provision for an international commission on policing. Until then the IRA would remain ‘on the sidelines’.89 It did not take a particularly negative cast of mind for many in the unionist community to interpret this as ‘the politics of threat’.
From June 1998 to December 1999 Trimble maintained a position of refusing to form an administration that included Sinn Féin until the weapons issue was seriously addressed. A tactically ingenious ‘sequencing’ proposition was put forward by the two governments at Hillsborough in April 1999, by which a ‘shadow executive’ would be formed, and within a month, during a ‘collective act of reconiliation’, some arms would ‘be put beyond use on a voluntary basis’ and powers devolved to the Executive. Martin McGuinness rejected the proposals as an ultimatum imposed by the British military establishment and Trimble.90 With repub-cans talking of the danger of a split, the UUP came under intense pressure to make a ‘leap of faith’ on the basis of 10 Downing Street's belief that there had been a ‘seismic shift’ in the republican position. Blair, buoyed up by his central role in the Kosovo conflict and keen to announce an Ulster deal to coincide with the inauguration of the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies, set a deadline of 30 June. If Trimble had felt any inclination to oblige a Prime Minister with whom he had an extremely good personal relationship, this was undermined by another bad election performance. In the European elections in June the Ulster Unionist candidate got 17.6 per cent of the vote, the party's lowest-ever share, and it narrowly avoided an ignominious fourth place behind Sinn Féin.91
Trimble's rejection of the two governments' new attempt at sequencing in July led to a reinvolvement of George Mitchell in a review of the Agreement that started in the autumn. Despite a recrudescence of IRA punishment beatings and killings during the summer, Mitchell achieved a breakthrough: an agreement by Trimble to recommend to his party that, in return for a commitment by republicans to address the decommissioning issue by the end of January 2000, an Executive could be formed. However, the souring of the atmosphere as a result of the publication of the Patten Report on policing in September made Trimble's offer conditional. The international commission headed by the ex-Tory politician and former Governor of Hong Kong produced a report that, while it did not recommend the disbanding of the force, as republicans demanded, put forward proposals for radical restructuring that most controversially proposed a change of name and insisted that the force's symbols should not reflect those of the British and Irish states. The report produced fierce denunciations from all shades of unionism.
Believing that he might not win a majority in the Ulster Unionist Council for his proposal to form a government that included Sinn Féin, Trimble promised to recall the Council in February to report on what progress there had been on weapons and deposited a post-dated letter of resignation as leader of the party with its President. Adams now claimed that Trimble had added a new precondition to what had been agreed in the talks chaired by George Mitchell. The result was that, while in January 2000 Northern Ireland had its first government since 1974, it lacked even the rudiments of a common understanding on what was a central issue – after all, under the Agreement the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was supposed to be completed by May 2000. This experience of devolved government lasted less than two months. While unionists had to get used to republicans running the departments of Health and Education (one of them, Martin McGuinness, popularly believed to have been a member of the IRA's Army Council until very recently), republicans appeared to have calculated that once the institutions of government were functioning, unionists would be reluctant to bring them down.
However, with the support of a more unionist-friendly Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, who had replaced Mowlam in October 1999, Trimble did not hesitate to use his threat of resignation to force Mandelson to suspend the institutions in February.This hard-nosed approach outraged nationalists, who claimed that Mandelson's assertion of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland violated the spirit of the Agreement. But it steadied nerves in his own party and forced republicans to move on arms. On 6 May an IRA statement committed it to putting its arms ‘completely and verifiably beyond use’ in a manner that would be acceptable to the International Commission on Decommissioning, headed by the Canadian General John de Chastelain. The return of devolution on 27 May 2000 took place after Trimble had got the support of 53 per cent of the 800 or so delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council, the party's ruling body. His margin of support in the Council had narrowed substantially from the 72 per cent who had voted in favour of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. However, neither nationalists nor republicans appeared to have much concern about this attenuation of pro-Agreement unionism. After two IRA arms dumps were independently inspected by a leading member of the ANC and a senior Finnish politician in June, there was little more of substance for General de Chastelain to report. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin and the SDLP criticized the British government for allegedly eviscerating the Patten Report, while Trimble used his powers as First Minister to ban Sinn Féin ministers from attending meetings of the North-South ministerial council and the implementation bodies.
With a senior republican claiming that Trimble's action and the failure of the British government to deliver on Patten and ‘demilitarization’ (the closing down of British Army installations in strategic border areas such as south Armagh was particularly emphasized) were threatening the peace process,92 2001 began gloomily for pro-Agreement Ulster Unionists. The IRA had formally disengaged from contacts with the international decommissioning body, and the UUP's continued involvement in government with Sinn Féin was a source of increasing intra-party conflict, as activists faced a
general election with a high probability of losses to the DUP. Reacting to this pressure, Trimble lodged a letter with the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly on 23 May, resigning as First Minister with effect from 1 July 2001 if by then the IRA had not begun to decommission. Despite this action, the UUP lost three seats in the general election while the DUP gained two. Without it, it is possible that the UUP would have lost two more seats: Trimble's own in Upper Bann, where he was hard-pressed by a fairly unknown DUP candidate, and East Antrim. The overall result UUP, 26.8 per cent and six seats; DUP, 22.5 per cent and five seats; Sinn Féin, 21.7 per cent and four seats; SDLP, 21 per cent and three seats – was interpreted by many commentators as a triumph for the extremes.93
This was an oversimplification. Such a judgement was based on a comparison with the 1997 election, thus ignoring the radical effects of the Belfast Agreement on the political environment in Northern Ireland, particularly its destabilizing influence on unionism. A better comparison is with the 1998 Assembly elections, and here the picture for pro-Agreement unionism was not quite so bleak. The UUP vote increased from 21.3 to 26.8 per cent; the DUP's victories were also accompanied by a shift in its discourse towards a more subtle and less hysterical critique of the Agreement. This was most ably accomplished by its victor in North Belfast, Nigel Dodds, who focused not on the influence of Dublin or the Vatican but on the unbalanced nature of the workings of the Agreement, which, he alleged, was hollowing out the ‘Britishness’ of the North. This took up emotionally powerful issues such as the ‘destruction of the RUC’ and Sinn Féin ministers' refusal to allow the Union flag to fly over their buildings.
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