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OPINION
Invasion of the Mercs was affront to unionist sensitivity
From IRISH TIMES December 16th, 1999
By MARY HOLLAND
Was it really necessary for Bertie Ahern to take his entire Cabinet to Armagh
on Monday for the inaugural meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council?
Talk about rubbing the unionists' noses in it.
Did nobody in the Department of Foreign Affairs stop to think about how
that awesome cavalcade of ministerial Mercs would look on television? Someone
in this office said it reminded him of a Mafia funeral. My own impression
was of the leaders of an invading army arriving to dictate surrender terms
to the defeated enemy.
The scene was shown a number of times on BBC Northern Ireland, where viewers
will have drawn their own, almost certainly tribal, conclusions. There was
a fine colour photograph of the first meeting of the North-South Ministerial
Council on the front page of Tuesday's Irish Times.
If you look very hard you can just about see David Trimble and Reg Empey
right at the back. I'm told that the two other UUP ministers were also seated
around the long table but, even with the help of a magnifying glass, I couldn't
recognise them. What the picture did show was that the unionists were comprehensively
outnumbered (some might say outgunned) by the combined representatives of
the pan-nationalist front. Between the Republic's Cabinet Ministers, the
SDLP and Sinn Fein, the various shades of green came to 21, compared with
four unionists.
The symbolism will not be lost on the Rev Ian Paisley or other anti-Agreement
unionists, some of them in Mr Trimble's own party. There was a consensus
in the media that the meeting went well, at least when compared with previous
attempts at setting up similar cross-Border co-operation. It was remarked
that there were no protests, as happened in the past.
David Trimble behaved with considerable grace under pressure. Even at the
press conference, when his clipped Ulster tones were completely overwhelmed
by the mellifluous rhetoric of the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste and Seamus Mallon,
he managed to hold his own without being discourteous. The Ulster Unionist
Party leader should not have been put in this defensive position.
It would have been more tactful, to put it mildly, to have had the Taoiseach
and Mr Trimble handling the press conference on their own, an arrangement
which would have projected parity of esteem rather than the visible discrepancy
in political numbers. Both communities in Northern Ireland are watching
the early days of the new political order like hawks. Any sign of triumphalism
or of Ministers favouring one side over the other will be carefully noted.
In this context, the symbolism of each carefully staged "historic" occasion
is important.
David Trimble's hope is that the first meeting of the British-Irish Council
in London tomorrow will provide unionists with an "enormously significant"
day of the kind which nationalists enjoyed on Monday. But it is unlikely
to resonate with the same emotion, if only because those who take part in
it will not carry the shared tragic history of 30 years of violence. It
is wonderful that these structures are being set up and that, on the eve
of a new millennium, we are witnessing such rapid progress towards a durable
peace. But, at the risk of sounding an unfashionably cautious note, it is
also important to remember that we are not quite there yet. It isn't just
that decommissioning hasn't gone away.
Many members of the unionist community, even those who want the Belfast
Agreement to work, are unhappy about the terms which David Trimble has had
to accept. They believe that in agreeing to set up the Executive prior to
any handover of weapons, he has been forced to bend the knee to the forces
of Irish nationalism, including the Provisional IRA.
Even within his own Assembly party, whose members have a vested interest
in the survival of the new political structures, there are those who disapprove
of Trimble's strategy. Others are quite openly waiting for him to fail.
The Ulster Unionist Party leader and those close to him know that this phase
of the peace process is strictly conditional. It provides a space to demonstrate
that the new Executive can work for the benefit of both communities, that
neither side need feel its identity or loyalties are threatened. |
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