Anyone read Eoghan Harris on David Trimble in the News Letter this last week? It's quite the piece.
For example there's this:
• Finally, I want to answer a sombre question which Dean Godson, Trimble's definitive biographer, put to me the day after Trimble's death.
Could Trimble have forged the same deal today, given the political culture of the Republic as it stands now?
Sadly, the answer is no. The Republic, in Bertie Ahern's time, was far more pluralistic, less Anglophobic and less tribal about unionists than it is today. Brexit must bear some of the responsibility for this regression. But the chief culprit, aided and abetted by an appeasing media, is Sinn Fein, the party which set out to subvert the Good Friday Agreement, the historic détente which Trimble delivered in 1998.
Does this not run in contradiction to his own words at around that time when Mary McAleese was running (successfully) for the President, where he called her a 'tribal time-bomb'. This supposedly more pluralistic, less Anglophobic 'Republic' was one where he and others wrote regularly - pouring scorn, and worse, on those like John Hume, and indeed Adams and those leading Sinn Féin in negotiations, in a language that was characterised by a negative fervour and intensity that at times seemed quite detached from reality. It is not that there weren't reasonable questions to ask about Sinn Féin's bona fides or its positions during this period. It was that even when SF time and again fulfilled the criteria laid down that was insufficient. They were always, and to judge from Harris's own writings remain, an irruption into the body politic, one that had to be dealt with in the harshest possible way and contained outside of it if at all possible and at all costs - because the actual prize of peace in the context of the island, an agreed peace appeared from the lines taken by some to be a worse outcome than perpetual conflict as long as they were excluded and however much they had to change to conform to the overall direction of travel. Yet even there remains yet another contradiction - for Harris himself notes that 'Here I want to refute the delusion, common among unionists with a slim grasp on political reality, that Trimble had any alternative to taking Sinn Fein into government without decommissioning.'
And yet PIRA did decommission.
But what of Trimble? Four years after the GFA/BA was voted for he said this.
Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble today accused nationalists of overreacting as the furore over his scathing criticisms of the Irish Republic rumbled on.
Mr Trimble sparked a wave of condemnation after he branded Northern Ireland's neighbour a ''pathetic sectarian state''.
But in a robust defence of his comments today he said: ''I think people are overreacting and taking something out of context.
''The context is, and it's something I have said many times before, the contrast between a liberal, multi-national state such as the United Kingdom on one hand, and on the other hand a monocultural state which is not as liberal as the United Kingdom.''
The point is not to speak ill of Trimble - he had a shining moment in 1998 and that's a genuine achievement on his part, indeed one might argue that his very personality made it easier for him to sell what he did in such a way that it convinced sufficient Unionists of the (very real) additional security it offered them as a community within the northern polity. Rather it is to regard the past with a necessary clarity and without illusion. Interesting the following response: "Ireland's Attorney General Michael McDowell accused Mr Trimble of hypocrisy, saying he was the leader of a party which treated Catholics as ''second class citizens''."
Speaking of which it really plausible that Sinn Féin's rise (as an aside abetted by what 'appeasing' media precisely, RTÉ, The Irish Times, the Independent? To ask the question is to show how curious the charge is) somehow has whipped up Anglophobia? That is to firstly misunderstand why Sinn Féin has gained popularity, off the back of economic, not nationalist/republican concerns, and secondly to afford that party altogether too much influence with respect to its actual power. It is an opposition. It cannot truly influence the political weather in the way that the parties that have governed in the last decade and long before, those being FF and FG primarily and the LP and the GP, have. The charge of Anglophobia is so serious that it deserves consideration on its own terms. No examples are offered. One can hesitantly suggest that it completely ignores the reality that it is Brexit that has led to a situation not of Anglophobia, but of concern and anxiety over a British government that has made common cause with Unionism when it suits it and has played fast and loose over the very GFA/BA that Harris himself lauds. Furthermore it is Unionism which from the of appears, if not quite as one certainly overwhelmingly in its political manifestations, to have sought harder rather than softer forms of Brexit and gone to some lengths to achieve those ends. To term this Anglophobia, or 'tribalism about unionism' is to exaggerate the dynamics at work and to misunderstand, whether wilfully or otherwise, the processes at work. It's also to ignore other aspects - the track record of Unionism in government at Stormont, a track record of effective cold war with others, the track record of the Tories in power in Westminster and their indifference to the GFA/BA when in power, the reality that far from Sinn Féin remaining on the outside it has made common cause with the SDLP and Alliance with respect to Brexit and the outworking thereof. Which leads one back to the idea that SF is 'subverting' the GFA/BA. In what sense? Again nothing is offered to support such a contention. It merely hangs there. The problem for that thesis is that a centre has indeed emerged, it is just not the centre of the fondest hope of the tranche of Irish opinion that Harris represents. But it is a centre and one where those who are part of it are fully attached to the institutions legitimised in 1998.
To ignore all that is to then offer a deeply misleading picture of what is actually taking place.
There are other oddities, though they too link into this obsession with Sinn Féin. For example in the following:
He made prescient speeches on the Arms Trial in the House of Commons in the 1990s, warning that the various attacks on Jack Lynch's record as Taoiseach were not so very veiled attempts to rehabilitate Charles Haughey, and by extension the IRA hawks who hovered over his head.
It would never have occurred to Lord Brookeborough or James Molyneaux to advance the unionist cause by appealing to a peace faction within the Republic's Fianna Fáil government — which belatedly blocked arming the IRA in Northern Ireland, albeit at the last minute. This not only showed Trimble's high intelligence, but his political guile, a characteristic one does not readily associate with modern unionist leadership.
All of which raises the question, so what? In the 1990s Charlie Haughey was politically a busted flush. And this strange collapsing of the time line from perceptions in the 1990s, after Haughey had left power, and long after the events of the 1960s and very early 1970s does not convince.
But that's almost an irrelevance. What we have here is a reframing of history in ways that do little justice to the past and none at all to the present.
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