Republican News · Thursday 18 October 2001

Kid gloves for the UDA and the UUP

BY MICHAEL PIERSE

Bertie Ahern, in an exchange last week in the Dáil with Sinn Féin's Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, conveyed something of the kid-glove attitude to which David Trimble has become accustomed. That attitude reads as follows: The UUP leader is wrong in suspending the institutions, destructive and impossible in asking for the exclusion of Sinn Féin and placing a veto at every step, but what else is he to do with the internal UUP rumblings he has to contend with?

Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin: "Does the Taoiseach recall the letter from David Trimble to the members of the Ulster Unionist Council almost 12 months ago, 26 October 2000? In that letter, Mr Trimble outlined his strategy to increase pressure on republicans and nationalists progressively, to place responsibility on republicans and "only that way can suspension be achieved"? Surely what we have now is the out-working of this Unionist strategy for suspension of the Good Friday institutions?"

Bertie Ahern: "The answer to that question is contained in the judicial findings of both the High Court and the Supreme Court in Northern Ireland. They have said that what David Trimble did on that occasion was wrong. We said that from the start and we all agreed with it. Trying to undermine the institutions or operate vetoes in them is clearly unhelpful and the legal process has answered that question. As we go forward, that ruling is now there. I remember well the morning that happened. It was the last Saturday in October. The Deputy and I will remember the reason David Trimble played that card on that morning, and I do not need to say any more. I disagreed with it but, in fairness, he is not here to answer. I remember why he did it."

Why David Trimble 'played that card on that morning' is quite easily explained by those who are eager to defend his every move. We are constantly bombarded with the assumption that 'poor David's' 'delicate leadership' of the UUP is dependant on his ability to assuage hardline party elements. This, we are informed, is for the good of the peace process, but leaves the 'beleaguered' leader with little room for manoeuvre. The clichéd irony is, we are told, that republicans must bend over backwards to save David Trimble's political neck.

d, the argument goes that because hardline unionist politicians are ill-at-ease with sitting in the same room with representatives linked with people who have guns, the IRA must decommission.

The absurdity of all this was revealed at the weekend when The Observer carried a sensational report about links between the UDA and UUP MP David Burnside. Now, if one was to pick a UUP figure who characterises all that is anti-Agreement, anti-republican, and a recognised threat to Trimble's leadership, David Burnside might easily be that figure.

A man who has whined about silent IRA arms, about power sharing, about the involvement of the Dublin government in the peace process, has, apparently, been having the UDA over for tea. So much for the UUP hardliner's distaste for violence.

At a time when the UDA's ceasefire has finally, belatedly, been declared extinct by the British government, when unionists should be empowering their own communities to speak out against the endless drug-dealing, pipe-bombings, killings, gun attacks and harassment carried out by the UDA, Burnside, it transpires, is working with them hand-in-hand.

What's letting unionism away with this charade is a mass media and British political establishment that, in pandering to the UUP and UDA, is becoming as discredited as those organisations in the process.

Sinn Féin had been calling for some time for John Reid to publicly recognise the reality that the UDA cessation was over and had been over for some time. John Reid reneged two weeks ago when he accepted the word of the UDA that it would stop the violence. Now, finally, most possibly because RUC personnel came under UDA attack, rather than out of any real concern for the nationalists who have endured hundreds more, Reid has been forced to act.

d this concern for the RUC, over the people the new policing service is supposed to represent, was re-echoed in another political charade this week. Much was made of the official change in name of the RUC next month to 'Police Service of Northern Ireland'.

Reid also made much of the fact that 154 Catholics have been recruited into the 'new force'. Yet when pressed by Sinn Féin on how he intends build equality of representation at all levels within that force, it was revealed that the British government have no answers and no plan. The 154 Catholics will be nothing more than pawns in an unrepresentative, unreconstructed RUC and will be used to buffer the unionist 'cosy cartel'.

They will be part of the kid glove mindset, that sees the UDA as unruly children who might have to be sent to their beds early and the UUP as difficult teenagers who need to be appeased at all costs.