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THREE In the Vanguard

‘I AM a product of the destruction of Stormont’, is David Trimble’s summation of his political genesis. On 24 March 1972, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, announced the prorogation of Northern Ireland’s Provincial Parliament and replaced it with direct rule from Westminster. The Troubles had already claimed 318 deaths, leading London to conclude that Ulster’s devolved system of government known by the shorthand of ‘Stormont’ was no longer the best way of kicking the issue of Northern Ireland ‘into touch’. Rather, as the Heath ministry saw it, Stormont was exacerbating the problem.¹ Many Unionists, including Trimble, believed that Heath had tyrannically altered the terms of the 1920 constitutional settlement – which they had imagined could only be done by agreement with Stormont. Since then, one of the consistent aims of Trimble’s political life has been to undo the effects of this traumatic episode, by regaining local control over the affairs of the Province. His argument with Unionist critics of the 1998 Belfast Agreement centres on whether he has paid too high a price to attain that objective.

Why was this imposing edifice of Portland limestone, named after its location deep inside Protestant east Belfast, invested with such significance?² Before the First World War, the Ulster Unionists had bitterly resisted devolved government to all of Ireland, otherwise known as ‘Home Rule’. They argued that it was little more than a halfway house to incorporation into an all-Ireland Republic, in which their liberties would endlessly be trampled upon by the island-wide Catholic majority. Led by Sir Edward Carson, they preferred to be governed like any other part of the United Kingdom from the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. But Lloyd George and the bulk of the British political class were not prepared to grant them this demand.³ Westminster had been convulsed for at least a generation by the affairs of Ireland and the parliamentary elites now wished to hold them at arm’s length. If possible, they also wished ultimately to reconcile the 26 (predominantly Catholic) southern counties with the six (heavily Protestant) northern counties. A permanently divided Ireland, many of the ruling elite calculated, could only be a recipe for further conflict and embarrasment in Britain’s backyard – and a possible strategic threat in time of war. Equally, an attempt to coerce Ulster into a united Ireland would also cause fighting and embarrassment.

Lloyd George, therefore, gave the Ulster Unionists a stark choice. He conceded that the six northern counties neither would nor could be coerced into a united Ireland. Ulster could ‘opt-out’ and run their own unique, semi-detached institutions of government – that is, Home Rule. The Ulster Unionists, who had never wanted this anomalous arrangement, now reluctantly accepted it in the changed circumstances. Many in London had at first envisaged it as only a temporary expedient, leading to eventual re-unification. But over time, the Unionists became comfortable with this settlement – maybe too comfortable for their own good. ‘A Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state’ was governed from 1922 by the Ulster Unionist Party: the phrase was coined in a debate on 24 April 1934 by Carson’s successor, Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. It was made in response to de Valera’s remarks about the Catholic nature of its southern counterpart (it was in the same speech that Craig also used another memorable phrase, ‘I have always said I am an Orangeman first and a politician and member of this Parliament afterwards’).⁴ Stormont thus came to be seen by the Ulster Unionists as their bulwark against a united Ireland. Or, more precisely, it was seen as a bulwark against potential British pressure to join such a state: the experiences of 1919 to 1921 had taught the Ulster Unionists that the liberties of this small group of British subjects could easily be sacrificed where broader British interests were deemed to be at stake. Ulster Unionists may have formed a majority in the six counties, but they were in a tiny minority in the United Kingdom as a whole. Stormont thus became the institutional expression of their wish to control their own destiny and the pace of change. Indeed, the famous Unionist slogan ‘Not an inch’ is an abbreviation of another of Sir James Craig’s pronouncements – ‘not an inch without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland’.5

Despite the rocky beginnings of the Northern Ireland state, successive British Governments did pay for the post-1921 settlement because Lloyd George’s solution of ‘semi-detachment’ seemed to have worked. During Terence O’Neill’s modernisation programme in the mid-1960s, it even appeared that residual sectarian differences would be dramatically modified by the ‘white heat’ of new technology. While allegations of discrimination in housing and employment and gerrymandering of electoral boundaries were still raised from time to time by assorted British civil libertarians and Labour MPs with large Irish populations in their constituencies, the issue of Northern Ireland was never at the forefront of the public consciousness until the late 1960s. Even within Ulster itself, the future looked rosy: David Trimble first became interested in national and international politics precisely because he found the politics of the pre-Troubles Province to be so soporific. Unlike many of his Unionist peer group, such as Sir Reg Empey or David Burnside, he had neither joined the Young Unionists nor the Queen’s University Unionist Association. Indeed, some loyalist critics of the Belfast Agreement told me privately that Trimble’s apparent emergence from nowhere suggested that he was some kind of long-term plant of the British state inside the unionist community.

A simpler explanation is that times of upheaval bring improbable individuals to the fore. After 1968, the state of Northern Ireland was under relentless assault. The offensive came first from the Civil Rights movement, elements of which successfully portrayed Stormont as little more than a discriminatory instrument of Protestant hegemony, and then from the resurgent IRA. Protestants, feeling their position under threat, retaliated. The exhausted RUC could not cope and regular British troops were dispatched during 1969 to aid the civil power. Three provincial Prime Ministers – Terence O’Neill, James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner – resigned or were deposed in quick succession. Worse still from a Unionist viewpoint, many of the nationalist allegations of sectarian injustices and a repressive security system now found a sympathetic hearing in British official and journalistic circles. As long as Stormont ‘worked’ (in the sense of keeping things quiet) the British were happy enough to let it be. Once it was seen as a source of discontent and international embarrassment, the British cast around for less bothersome alternatives. The allegations against Stormont shaped one of the constants of British Government policy over a quarter-century: namely, that Unionists could never again be trusted with simple majority rule on the basis of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Henceforward, they would have to share power with representatives of the nationalist minority.

To a young man like Trimble, it all had a ‘disorienting effect. The established landmarks in one’s life were shifting and I did not know where it would lead to.’⁶ Trimble also disliked the way in which the British Army, which was accountable to central government, was introduced on to the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969. Like so many Loyalists, he felt it undermined the role of the old RUC and the locally raised militia called the Ulster Special Constabulary (or ‘B’ Specials), which were accountable to the Government of Northern Ireland.⁷ He did not, however, initially respond by becoming politically active. Indeed, his first experience of elections owed more to informal peer pressure within the Law Faculty than to any reaction to the collapse of public order. Trimble was approached by Harry Calvert: would he help his friend Basil McIvor, then running in the 1969 Northern Ireland General Election as the Ulster Unionist candidate for one of the newly created south Belfast constituencies? Trimble knew McIvor’s wife Jill, who worked in the Law Faculty. ‘Even at that time I had difficulty in saying no,’ recalls Trimble. ‘I find it embarrassing. If people are pressing me, it’s easy to say no, but if they ask nicely, it’s much harder.’⁸

It was, at first glance, an unlikely pairing, for Basil McIvor was the most liberal of Unionists and a staunch ally of Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s aloof, patrician Prime Minister.⁹ Moreover, he was one of very few UUP MPs elected to the old Stormont not to have been a member of the Orange Order.¹⁰ Trimble, by contrast, had always disliked O’Neill’s style and his increasingly flaccid response to the disturbances: he less minded O’Neill’s reforms than their timing, which he felt showed weakness and which could only encourage more violence. There was, however, another attraction in aiding McIvor. McIvor’s seat not only contained such unionist terrain as Larkfield, Finaghy and Dunmurry, but also included the adjacent, predominantly Catholic, area of Andersonstown: Trimble wanted to see what it was like and duly canvassed it. In February 1969, things were not yet so polarised as to preclude such an excursion and Trimble even received a good reception – so much so that he reckons that as many as 1000 to 1500 votes out of McIvor’s winning total came from Andersonstown (though some of these may have been cast by Protestants then still living in the area).¹¹

Subsequently, Trimble sought to join the UUP but received no reply to his letter of application. The inertia of party HQ at Glengall Street in central Belfast seemed to him to incarnate all that was wrong with the organisation of the time. Glengall Street had failed to provide a sustained or coherent intellectual response to the critique of the Northern Irish state advanced by the nationalists and their left-wing allies on the mainland.¹² In consequence, says Trimble, ‘quite a few contemporaries tamely accepted this fashionable view of things – of a politically and morally corrupt establishment. There was a widespread view then of a poor, down-trodden minority. Those of the same age as me all went with the spirit of the times – Unionist Government bad, Civil Rights movement good. When things went pear-shaped, one gets the impression that the middle classes opted out of unionist politics altogether and headed for a safe port. They found it in the nice, uncontroversial New Ulster Movement and later in the Alliance party’. The reaction of one colleague from Queen’s was typical of the times: driving down the Shankill Road past Malvern Street, where an organisation styling itself as the ‘UVF’ had perpetrated a couple of grisly murders in 1966, his companion observed ‘ah, we’re passing your spiritual home’. Trimble was angered by the remark, but was not deterred. Indeed, the challenge of articulating a Unionist response also appealed to the counter-cyclical, even contrarian aspects of his nature: ‘My feeling that they were wrong was not entirely intellectual, it was in my bones as well. But it took me a couple of years to work things out. I usually do find myself uncomfortable with fashionable views and I have spent most of my life arguing against them.’¹³

Trimble, therefore, responded to the crisis in the only way he knew: he searched the stacks at Queen’s and read, read and read. There was a dearth of material. For although there had been some ‘Unionist’ historical writing during the Stormont years – such as St John Ervine’s biography of Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland – there had been little Unionist political thought since the 1950s.¹⁴ With their massive majorities at Stormont, and little opposition, Ulster Unionists had become complacent. Trimble’s aim over the last 30 years, and especially since becoming leader, has been two-fold: first, to persuade Unionists to think politically and not just to wave the Union flag at election time; and, as a consequence of that, to persuade the broad unionist middle classes to re-engage in politics. Later, Trimble found one unexpected source of inspiration. These were the publications of the British and Irish Communist Organisation (first known as the Irish Communist Organisation). Many then considered B&ICO was then a self-consciously Stalinist (but non-sectarian) faction. A substantial number of its leading lights believed that the British multi-national state was invested with certain progressive possibilities (by contrast, a large number of them contended that northern nationalism, encouraged by southern irredentist elements, was a sectional diversion from the reality of class struggle). Adapting Stalin’s theory of nationality to the Irish context, B&ICO had come to conclude that Irish republicans had fundamentally misanalysed the situation. Far from northern Protestants being a minority within the Irish nation, they were a distinct nation of their own, no less entitled than the Catholics to political self-determination: any attempt to coerce them would not merely be foredoomed to failure, but would also lead to a blood-bath by virtue of dividing the working class. This became known as the ‘two nations’ theory (at the same time, B&ICO also believed in civil rights for Catholics – and that the British state was the best vehicle for achieving these complementary ends). He was particularly influenced by three of their pamphlets: The Economics of Partition, The Birth of Ulster Unionism and The Home Rule Crisis 1912–14. In time, Trimble also became a fan of Workers’ Weekly, the newsletter of an allied organisation, the Workers’ Association for a Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland – a compliment which that journal did not always reciprocate through the late 1970s and 1980s. It found him too devolutionist and Ulster nationalist for their more integrationist tastes (in its issue of 28 October 1978, following Trimble’s speech at the UUP conference, Workers’ Weekly described him as an ‘advocate of getting Stormont back at all costs’). After Trimble became leader, the links with the left endured. Thus, Paul Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen’s and Henry Patterson, Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster – both of them formerly of the Workers’ Association – became two of his strongest supporters in academe. And John Lloyd, the staunchly Trimbleista former Editor of the New Statesman who later worked for the Financial Times, had been in B&ICO itself for a time.

The retreat to the ivory tower was perhaps a predictable response for a shy academic who felt he needed to be on intellectually secure ground before entering the fray. Curiously, Trimble’s unworldliness contributed in another very different way to his political education. From 1970–2 he lived for the only time in his life in Belfast – at 12 Kansas Avenue, just off the Antrim Road. He had moved into an area from which Protestants were rapidly departing. Nonetheless, he imagined that it was far enough up the Antrim Road and middle-class enough to avoid the clashes between the Catholic residents of the New Lodge and Protestants from the neighbouring Tiger’s Bay. If so, it proved a forlorn hope, for Trimble regularly witnessed many sectarian confrontations at Duncairn Gardens. The experience further convinced him of the inefficacy of the Ulster Unionist establishment’s approach, and that something more had to be done. But through what vehicle? Some of his contemporaries had joined the New Ulster Movement. To Trimble, however, the Alliance party did little to confront the Republican political offensive. Rev. Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionists would certainly have been a possibility for a Unionist who wanted to protest against the alleged weakness of their traditional leadership. But as Trimble saw it, Paisley did too little to save Stormont for his own partisan reasons: if the provincial parliament went, so too would the UUP’s patronage powers and therefore the DUP would be able to compete more equally with the UUP.¹⁵ Trimble met Paisley for the first time during the 1973 Assembly elections on a broad loyalist platform. His reaction was mixed: ‘One appreciated the broad earthy humour, and when he’s in a good mood he can be charming. And, obviously, he has considerable gifts of crowd oratory. I would not have been very well disposed to him because of the inconsistencies of his background – his integrationist views and his flirtation with negotiating with Irish nationalism. Then there was the raucousness of his presentation and his purely sectarian approach. I occasionally looked at the Protestant Telegraph [Paisley’s newspaper] and was struck by the crudity of it and that it contained too many vulgar quips from a churchman. And the more I think of it, it’s an accurate reflection of his personality.’¹⁶ For the bulk of the intervening three decades, the relationship of the two men would be antagonistic rather than cooperative. Both men are known for not mincing their words at each other.

It seemed to many, including David Trimble, that the abolition of Stormont was a precursor to a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.¹⁷ Even Brian Faulkner, whose energy and dynamism Trimble had hitherto admired, seemed to him to have no clue as to how to respond. Only one man appeared to Trimble to have the answers: William Craig, sacked from O’Neill’s cabinet in 1968 for attacking the drift of Stormont’s policy. Craig anticipated that Heath would move against the Unionists and urged that Ulstermen prepare for the coming constitutional crisis. Subsequently, he condemned Faulkner for meekly acceding to the abolition of Stormont – reckoning that Faulkner should have called a Northern Ireland General Election to demonstrate that Heath’s unilateral violation of the 1920 constitutional settlement had no popular support.¹⁸ But Craig went further still. Although he was mild-mannered in private and was a flat platform speaker, he nonetheless had a flair for the dramatic pronouncement. ‘I can tell you without boasting that I can mobilise 80,000 men who will not seek a compromise in Ulster,’ he told a meeting of the Monday Club in the House of Commons. ‘Let us put bluff aside. I am prepared to kill and those behind me will have my full support for we shall not surrender.’¹⁹

Certainly Craig – like Trimble – vaulted into the national consciousness as a hardline Unionist. But both men were far more complex than they first appeared. Indeed, when each man eventually sought to treat with the representatives of Irish nationalism, their flexibility would amaze supporters and opponents alike. Born in 1924, Craig had been a gunner in RAF Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. After building up successful solicitor’s practices, he had entered the Northern Ireland Parliament for Larne in 1960. During the O’Neill era, he was portrayed (along with Faulkner) as a dynamic, modernising Wunderkind who could accomplish great things for the Province: a meritocratic, almost Wilsonian contrast with the ‘big house’ Unionists who largely ran the Province till 1971. Craig was also an ardent proponent of German-style federalism for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Significantly, Trimble recalls that Craig and he were the only two elected Unionists publicly to support a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 Referendum on the Common Market.²⁰ Moreover, most Ulster Unionists were instinctive Tories who until 1974 took the Conservative whip in the Commons – hence the latter party’s official title of ‘Conservative and Unionist’. By contrast, neither Craig nor Trimble were High Tories in the Enoch Powell mode.

These subtleties were, for the time being, lost in the mêlée. Unionist Ulster felt it was fighting for its life. Only a campaign of mass cross-class mobilisation – of the kind which Loyalists had launched against Home Rule in 1912 – could save the Province from absorption into an all-Ireland Republic. To a young Unionist activist at Queen’s such as David Burnside, it did not then seem improbable that such a feat could be replicated. After all, it had been accomplished within living memory: veterans of the original UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division still regularly walked on Orange marches and there were large numbers of people around with military training from the Second World War.²¹ Craig’s chosen vehicle for conducting the struggle was the Vanguard Movement, which he launched as a pressure group within the Unionist party on 9 February 1972. Following the precedent of 1912, they produced a Vanguard Covenant. It asserted that the 1920 settlement – which partitioned Ireland into two parts, North and South – could not be undone save with the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. By proroguing Stormont, and introducing an almost colonial system of direct rule from Westminster, Heath had unilaterally abrogated the terms of that bargain. The key test of political authority, the consent of the governed, was now lacking. Craig was accused of denying the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; but he replied that there were political and moral limits to its theoretical power to legislate as it pleased.

Such propositions would have been uncontroversial amongst most Unionists. But where Vanguard differed was that it drew some highly radical conclusions from this state of affairs. Historically, the unique Ulster-British way of life had best been preserved by Union with Great Britain. But what if Ulster was locked into a loveless marriage and her affections were not reciprocated? What if the terms of that marriage could be altered under pressure from Irish nationalists and the IRA – as exemplified by Westminster’s unilateral destruction of Stormont? What, indeed, if Westminster could use its sovereign power within the Union to deliver the Ulstermen ‘bound into the hands of our enemies’? The price of marriage would then have become too high. Thus, for Vanguard, the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If they could not regain an Ulster Parliament on satisfactory terms within the Union, then Vanguard preferred negotiated independence. The arrangements enjoyed by the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man – under the Crown but not in the Union – looked attractive. Vanguard’s enthusiasm for independent dominion status would soon expose them to accusations from some supporters of Faulkner that they were no longer Unionists, but rather had become ‘Ulster nationalists’.²²

At the time, Trimble was prepared to give such Vanguardist ideas a fair wind. In an article in the Sunday News on 20 January 1974, he rebutted the views of Desmond Boal, QC, a leading adviser of Paisley. Boal believed that the time for greater integration of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom had passed – but that Ulster independence had never been a runner. Instead, he favoured a federal Ireland Parliament and Provincial Parliament with ‘Stormont’ powers.²³ Trimble took particular issue with Boal’s rejection of independence for Northern Ireland. He argued that if one accepted the notion that the British were prepared to pay large sums of money to leave Northern Ireland, then they would surely be just as happy to subsidise an independent Ulster as a united Ireland. He was implying that the coercion of Ulster into a united Ireland was costlier than independence. By contrast, independence might satisfy enough unionists and nationalists to leave behind a relatively stable entity. Intriguingly, he posited the idea that republicans mainly disliked ‘British’ forces, but had an ambiguous attitude towards Protestants (whom he did not describe as ‘British’). Once these ‘British’ forces were gone, and Protestants gave a guarantee that the purpose of such an entity was not to reinforce an anti-Catholic hegemony, all but the most irreconcilable elements of the republican movement might be able to enter into some compact in a new, independent Ulster.

Such ideas must have seemed fairly fanciful as sectarian tensions sharpened. Vanguard held a series of Province-wide rallies, culminating in a great demonstration at Belfast’s Ormeau Park in March 1972: the News Letter estimated the crowd to be 92,000, the RUC put it at 60,000.²⁴Theatricality was an integral part of the Craig roadshow, who would arrive at gatherings with motorcycle outriders. It was widely reported that they were members of a uniformed group called the Vanguard Service Corps – although Trimble, for one, now doubts whether it actually ever existed in any organised sense. Trimble rebuts all allegations by the now deceased loyalist Sam McClure – that he was sworn into VSC at an initiation ceremony at Vanguard headquarters in Hawthornden Road – as ‘utter balls’.²⁵ Some nationalists found Vanguard gatherings fascistic and even Trimble now says he was ‘never terribly comfortable’ at these ‘embarrassing’ occasions. Nonetheless, he attended many such events. He was present at Castle Park, Bangor, in February 1972, where Craig inspected 6,500 men as they stood to attention wearing Vanguard armbands (although Trimble declined to wear one).²⁶ He also turned up for the mass gathering at Stormont, just days after the abolition of the Northern Ireland Parliament had been announced.²⁷

Given the circumstances – both civil war and British withdrawal seemed to be on the cards – Trimble did not consider Craig’s rhetoric to be unjustified. ‘Craig had a tendency to outbursts and to overstate things even before the Troubles,’ recalls Trimble. ‘But he was saying, “Look, there are a lot of people who don’t like the direction of government policy and if pushed they are prepared to fight.” His intention was to make Government in London sit up and think. He certainly succeeded in getting negative publicity!’ Some felt that Craig was unleashing terrible forces in society, but Trimble does not agree: ‘There were lots of things unleashing those forces – the abolition of Stormont, the IRA campaign. If anything, Craig’s rhetoric provided an emotional safety valve.’²⁸ It was more than just rhetoric, though: Vanguard, after all, ‘saw itself as a resistance movement against an undemocratic regime that could be shown to be unworkable when the time came’. To that end, it aimed for ‘the coordination of all loyalist organisations under one banner to save Ulster’. The largest of these was the Ulster Defence Association, then still a legal organisation probably numbering about 40,000 members.²⁹‘Everybody was in it then,’ says Trimble. ‘I was conscious there were criminal types, but they were not dominant. The organisation then was a broad popular response to a near-civil war situation. But what’s happened to the loyalist paramilitaries is that the criminal types have taken over and the broad popular types have gone away’ (indeed, to this day, he thinks that the conventional police wisdom is wrong and that the Ulster Freedom Fighters are not a mere flag of convenience for the UDA, but are a separate organisation). In retrospect, however, he concedes that Craig’s condemnation of Protestant paramilitarism was inadequate.³⁰

Trimble never saw himself as a street activist in this cause; his contribution, he thought, would be as a cerebral backroom boy. In 1972, after his flat in Belfast became too dangerous, he moved back to Bangor and resumed contact with some local Orangemen. It was they who provided him with his first public platform at the Ballygrainey Orange Hall at Six Road Ends, between Bangor and Newtownards. In 1973, the British Government had produced a White Paper, which outlined some possible political structures for the Province. The new Assembly would be elected by proportional representation rather than the traditional first-past-the-post (in fact, there had been PR elections during the early years of Stormont, but these had soon been scrapped, largely to maintain the unity of the UUP).³¹ No one knew how to operate the Single Transferable Vote system – except, everyone thought, David Trimble. Trimble, in fact, had to go into the Queen’s University library where he found a book on electoral systems by Enid Lakeman.³² His description of how many candidates to run and how to maximise transfers so impressed one of those present, Albert Smith, that he called on Trimble shortly afterwards. Trimble recalls him asking: ‘“Would you like to give another talk?” I said yes, but when? “Tonight!” came the reply. It turned out he wanted me to speak to a North Down Vanguard meeting at Hamilton House, Bangor. I never looked back.’³³

There, he met up with a group opposed to the local Faulknerite Unionist establishment. They included George Green, the former County Commandant of the since disbanded ‘B’ Specials, who was by now an independent councillor in the area. More important still to his long-term political development, he also met a Vanguard councillor, Mary O’Fee. Her husband, Stewart, was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, who would telephone Craig and identify himself as ‘the Seaside Voice’. Trimble worried that the ‘tide of history’ was turning against the Unionists, but Stewart O’Fee snorted dismissively and told him to read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, which he found inspirational.³⁴ But O’Fee came to have an even more direct influence: he was the anonymous author of two Vanguard’s best pamphlets, Ulster – A Nation (April 1972) and Community of the British Isles (1973).³⁵ The former, in Trimble’s own words, ‘hurled defiance at our enemies’. It was a trenchant rebuttal of the High Tory case for Ulster’s integration into the United Kingdom along the lines of Scotland and Wales, whose best-known advocate was Enoch Powell. But O’Fee believed this approach contained profound dangers for Ulster. First, the Province would be integrated into the more urbanised, ‘permissive society’ of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ – an unattractive end in itself for a still-religious people. Second, even if it was desirable in principle, integrationists did not possess the means to achieve this: peaceful persuasion would not work since the main British parties did not want it and street protests to attain it would only alienate their fellow citizens with whom they wanted to integrate. Third, Trimble shared O’Fee’s belief that pure integration, without any body which Ulster could call its own to undergird it, contained a political trap. They both believed that integration could only work if the three main parties at Westminster supported the Union. But since many in Labour and the Liberals then appeared to favour the principle of Irish unity, albeit peacefully achieved, as an ultimate outcome, integration would leave Ulster and its tiny twelve-man contingent at the mercy of the 630-strong Commons.