[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 133 (Tuesday, September 30, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10225-S10226]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  VISIT OF DAVID TRIMBLE OF THE NORTHERN IRELAND ULSTER UNIONIST PARTY

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, next week David Trimble, leader of the 
Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, will begin a visit to the 
United States where he will meet with many of us on both sides of the 
aisle in Congress who are deeply committed to helping achieve a lasting 
peace in Northern Ireland. There is perhaps no one better placed to 
make that happen than Mr. Trimble, who leads Northern Ireland's largest 
party.
  Mr. Trimble is to be commended for bringing his party into the 
current talks, which now include Sinn Fein as a result of the 
restoration of the IRA cease-fire in July. Those talks are ably

[[Page S10226]]

chaired by our former Senate colleague, George Mitchell.
  Mr. Trimble and his party faced many difficulties in deciding to 
participate in talks which include Sinn Fein. There is a long history 
of distrust by both sides in Northern Ireland, and the fears and 
concerns of unionists cannot be dismissed. Mr. Trimble spent the month 
of August consulting with many people and concluded that his 
constituents want his party to participate in the talks as the best 
hope for achieving a peaceful settlement.
  Huge challenges lie ahead. Negotiating a solution which can obtain 
the support of both communities is a formidable task. But at long last, 
the principal parties are at the negotiating table and real dialogue is 
beginning. David Trimble deserves a significant share of the credit for 
this long-sought progess. I look forward to his visit to this country, 
and I ask unanimous consent that an excellent article in the September 
29 issue of Time Magazine be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                      [From Time, Sept. 29, 1997]

                              Face To Face

                         (By Barry Hillenbrand)

       It was no surprise last week when, just as historic talks 
     began to try to dissolve the annealed hate that divides 
     Northern Ireland, a 400-lb. bomb exploded in a largely 
     Protestant town near Belfast. The hard men for whom terrorism 
     has become a way of life were again trying to blow away the 
     chance for peace. Nor was it a surprise that the Protestant 
     politicians, who fear any change in their domination of the 
     province, denounced the bombing as a Roman Catholic 
     republican plot that made the talks impossible.
       But it was a surprise when, one day after the explosion, 
     the talks began anyway, bringing together for the first time 
     the leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish 
     Republican Army, which has waged war to drive the British off 
     the island of Ireland, and the main leaders of their bitter 
     Protestant Unionist opponents. That the talks began at all 
     was a triumph of patience, persistence and cleverness by the 
     governments of Ireland, Britain and the U.S., which are 
     shepherding the broader peace process.
       It was also a measure of how much has changed in Northern 
     Ireland over the past half dozen years. Most important, the 
     1.6 million people of the province, Protestant and Catholic 
     alike, have come to hate the war of hate and are demanding 
     peace. Second, the terrorists have come to believe they can 
     win more from talking than from killing. And finally, the 
     huge parliamentary majority rolled up by Tony Blair and the 
     Labour Party has stripped the recalcitrant Unionists of their 
     veto over the efforts of the British government to change the 
     status of its troubled province.
       In the past the Unionists have been able simply to 
     stonewall the peace process. But last week, there at the head 
     of the Unionist delegation was David Trimble, a hot-tempered, 
     frequently red-faced law lecturer who heads Northern 
     Ireland's largest and most important Protestant party, the 
     Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.).
       For years Trimble, like many other Unionists, refused to 
     sit down in the same room with Sinn Fein repesentatives. Once 
     Trimble stormed out of a TV interview in the midst of a live 
     broadcast because he was about to be electronically linked 
     with a Sinn Fein member in another studio. But in August the 
     British government declared that a new I.R.A. cease-fire was 
     genuine and that Sinn Fein was thus qualified to join the 
     political talks jointly sponsored by London and Dublin under 
     the chairmanship of former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. 
     Suddenly, Sept. 15, the date set for the start of a new round 
     of talks, became the moment of truth for Trimble, Sinn Fein 
     would join the talks, but would Trimble take his party in?
       If Trimble's temperament and political background were any 
     guide, the answer would clearly have been no. As a young 
     lecturer in law at Queen's University in Belfast in the late 
     '60s, Trimble joined a fringe political group Vanguard, that 
     condemned the U.U.P., the party Trimble was later to head, 
     for being insufficiently hard line. He flirted with other 
     extremist groups before finally coming to terms with the 
     U.U.P. and being elected to Parliament as one of its 
     candidates in 1990. His rise to the top of the party was 
     swift. He won the leadership slot in 1995, largely on the 
     strength of the militant image he had acquired by marching at 
     the head of a triumphalist Protestant parade that bullied its 
     way through a besieged Catholic neighborhood. ``We were in 
     despair when he was elected,'' says a moderate in Trimble's 
     party. ``We thought all hope for peace and accommodation was 
     gone.''
       But Trimble has changed. Once he became leader of the 
     party, there was a concerted effort by Britain and the U.S. 
     to erode his narrow provincialism by getting him to travel 
     outside Ulster, a process that had worked well with Gerry 
     Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein. For a man who once bragged he 
     had never set foot outside the U.K., it was a heady 
     experience. Trimble visited the U.S., long shunned by 
     Unionists as the bastion of fervent I.R.A. support. He had 
     coffee with President Bill Clinton and chatted with the sort 
     of Congressmen he once considered the enemies of Unionism. 
     Now Trimble's office hands out copies of the Congressional 
     Record featuring a speech paying tribute to the Irish 
     Protestant tradition in America. Its author: Ted Kennedy, 
     the Irish republican's greatest champion in Congress. 
     Trimble also traveled to South Africa with delegations of 
     other parties from Northern Ireland for a conference on 
     Conflict resolution.
       Trimble is still a staunch Unionist and profoundly leery of 
     Sinn Fein. Before walking into the talks last week, he 
     defiantly said he had come not to ``negotiate with Sinn Fein 
     but to confront them and to expose their facist character.'' 
     ``Yet,'' says David Ervine, a senior official of the 
     Progressive Unionist Party, who marched into talks with 
     Trimble last week, ``Trimble has come further than any 
     Unionist leader in history.'' He has broken out of the siege 
     mentality, which for years had Unionist leaders hiding behind 
     banners proclaiming no surrender and refusing to consider any 
     accommodation with the Catholic minority or with the Irish 
     Republic to the south. ``We are certainly going to address 
     the views of those who consider themselves Irish and don't 
     want to be part of the United Kingdom,'' says Trimble. ``We 
     have to respect their cultural identity and protect their 
     civil rights. We are comfortable with that.'' But, of course, 
     Trimble holds fast to the basic principle of Unionism: that 
     Northern Ireland should remain part of the U.K.
       Despite his firm belief that the I.R.A. cease-fire is a 
     sham, Trimble recognized that the moral burden of continuing 
     the peace process has fallen on him. ``We could have stayed 
     back and waited for the talks to collapse without us,'' says 
     Trimble. But then we would have been accused of blocking 
     peace.''
       Trimble also knew that the popular political mood in 
     Northern Ireland was running strongly in favor of all-
     inclusive peace talks. The failure of the I.R.A. cease-fire 
     which collapsed in February 1996, had profoundly depressed 
     people. This summer sectarian tension once again ran high, 
     and Northern Ireland teetered on the edge of what one of the 
     senior members of Mitchell's team warned could have been 
     ``full-scale civil war.'' The I.R.A. cease-fire announced in 
     July and the promise of peace talks in September again raised 
     hopes. Says Christopher McGimpsey, a U.U.P. city councilor 
     from Belfast: ``We were hearing from the grass roots that we 
     should enter talks.''
       Trimble also received a powerful shove through the 
     negotiating gates from Blair. First, Blair warned Sinn Fein 
     that if it wanted to have a say in the future of Northern 
     Ireland, it would have to secure a cease-fire from the I.R.A. 
     and agree to respect democratic principles. When it did just 
     that, Blair turned his attention to Trimble's Unionists. 
     ``Some Unionists failed to understand that if we do not join 
     the talks, London and Dublin could impose a political 
     solution on us,'' says John Taylor, the deputy leader of 
     Trimble's party. With that possibility staring him in the 
     face, Trimble could hardly have said no to the talks.
       Even after last week's bombing, Trimble arrived for the 
     talks. ``Two years ago,'' said Marjorie (``Mo'') Mowlam, the 
     tough-talking, no-nonsense British Secretary of State for 
     Northern Ireland, ``it would not have been possible for 
     Trimble to move forward after a bomb like that. Now Unionism 
     wants its leaders to be talking.'' And in the North, that is 
     surprising progress.

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