The man who put the `No way' in Norway
Mícheál MacDonncha casts a sharp eye over Trimble's Oslo speech
David Trimble's speech in Oslo must rank as one of the most
reactionary diatribes ever delivered during decades of Nobel Peace
Prize ceremonies. Most attention initially focused on its ungenerous
and unstatesmanlike tone, with Trimble succumbing to the temptation
to have a swipe at Sinn Féin from an international platform. This
party political note soured most observers and did the unionist cause
much harm.
But closer examination of the speech reveals a deeply conservative
theme as Trimble attempted to use philosophy to justify the political
cod-acting and filibustering of the Unionists as they resist the
implementation of the Agreement to which Trimble was a party on Good
Friday.
This is not surprising as it has since emerged that Eoghan Harris was
one of the authors - if not THE author - of the speech. Many passages
are pure Harris, including the one about Sinn Féin ``drinking from the
dark stream of fascism''.
There was a thinly veiled swipe at John Hume also with the SDLP
leader's well-known speaking style described as ``the kind of rhetoric
which substitutes vapour for vision''.
other classic piece of Harris-speak - this time actually
acknowledged as such by Trimble - was his talk of the need for ``acts
of good authority... acts addressed to their own side''. This refers
to the need for politicians to `police' their own side, to stamp out
errant ideas much as Harris hoped to do when he was a producer in RTE
and urged that the ``leaky national consensus'' be repaired through
censorship and propaganda.
Trimble's tone was suffocatingly patronising and the thrust of his
address was warning about what cannot be done and ought not to be
attempted, rather than pointing forward to what is possible with
leadership and effort.
While Hume spoke of conflict resolution Trimble refused to recognise
that this is what he, as First Minister designate, is supposed to be
engaged in. In a passage which has the Harris fingerprints Trimble
said:
``Given that the Ulster British people are coming out of the
experience of 35 years of `armed struggle' directed against them they
have given our appeals a generous hearing.''
There was pointedly no recognition here of the shared suffering of
all in the conflict or acceptance of the common responsbility for
past conflict and present resolution of conflict.
The speech posed as an impassioned plea for the practical in politics
at a time when the practical steps outlined in the Good Friday
Agreement are being blocked by Trimble and his party.
Trimble - or rather Harris - took as his text the work of Edmund
Burke. Burke was an 18th century Irish politician in the British
parliament and a member of several British administrations whose
pleas for modest reform masked a deep reaction. He became the leading
and most eloquent opponent of the French Revolution and thus allied
himself with all the despots of Europe. He defended monarchy and
aristocratic privilege and in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France painted up the old feudal system - personified in the absurd
and pampered French Queen Marie Antoinette - as the only tried and
trusted system of government.
Burke is one of the heroes of Conor Cruise O'Brien, like Harris a key
ideologue in the anti-nationalist/anti-republican ranks. Indeed,
Trimble's speech could be described as throughly anti-republican in
every sense of that term. The republicansim represented by Sinn Féin
is of course attacked but the ideas he put forward on a broader scale
attack the basis of democratic government.
Burke's tirade against the French Revolution was answered brilliantly
by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet The Rights of Man. This book had
unprecedented sales in Ireland where it was avidly read by Trimble's
Presbyterian forebears and inspired them to become democrats.
Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irish republicanism, described the
book as the Koran of Belfast. Harris/Trimble tried to brand political
idealism as fascism just as Burke branded the French Revolutionaries
as the ``swinish multitude''. Ironic indeed given that we have been
marking the 200th anniversary of the United Irish Rising and the part
played by French Revolution-inspired Ulster Presbyterians in that
Year of Liberty.
Ironic also that Trimble delivered his diatribe 50 years to the day
after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United
Nations on 10 December 1948. This is the leader of a party that
resisted the equality elements of the Good Friday Agreement; that
resists the idea of an Equality Department; that will tolerate only
cosmetic changes in the RUC; that opposes demilitarisation; and that
maintains its links with the sectarian Orange Order.
It is easy to be mesmerised by the unfolding political events of the
peace process. Underlying these events, however, is an ideological
battle between the progressive republican outlook and the reactionary
conservatism which pervades unionism.
The Oslo speech, while lost on its international audience, was
clearly a defensive blast against the tide of progress which is
rising in Ireland. Trimble has the choice to sail with that tide or
to be stranded on the sandbar of history. It is time for both
governments to face him with the choice.
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