http://www.sbpost.ie/story.jsp?story=WCContent%3Bid-50715
Trimble's gun to his own head gag works again
By Sean Mac Catrhaigh
Dublin, Ireland, 7 July, 2002
It is pretty obvious by now that David Trimble is a big fan of the film Blazing Saddles. Last week, for the nth time, he re-enacted the famous scene where the black sheriff put a gun to his own head and shouts: "Nobody move or the nigger gets it!"
The Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the British prime minister Tony Blair once more played along with this tribute to the Mel Brooks classic, dutifully sparing Trimble's political life by throwing him a finely- worded concessionary press release.
But they have long ago twigged that Trimble is the maker of his own misfortune, and they are now tiring of his antics. What Trimble wants is for the Good Friday Agreement to be either renegotiated or abandoned, and replaced with a unionist assembly. But what he will get, ultimately, is joint authority.
The reason Trimble is so frantic these days has nothing to do with imaginary IRA activity, and everything to do with the Assembly elections scheduled for next May. Trimble is watching the make-up of the candidate selection committees within his Ulster Unionist Party, and knows that most are now in the hands of the anti-Agreement faction.
In brief, this means he is doomed. A majority of the UUP's candidates -- and a majority of those elected to the Assembly -- will be anti-Agreement. Many of those who are not will, at the very least, feel they must harden their tone to fit in with the party line.
When the Assembly meets, these victorious candidates will not agree to share power with Sinn Féin, the largest nationalist party, and no administration will be formed.
Trimble, if he has managed to remain leader until then, will find his position untenable. Jeffrey Donaldson or David Burnside would be likely candidates to succeed him, and would immediately cuddle up to the DUP.
Most of this is Trimble's own fault -- he chose not to sell the Agreement to middle-class unionists, and concentrated instead on trying to convince the extremists that he was just playing along with power-sharing until he could find a way to shaft the republicans.
But some of it lies in the unpalatable fact that a rather large number of unionists, including middle-class ones, simply do not like Catholics, and regard them to be unfit as neighbours and friends.
Last month the Rev Dr John Dunlop, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church, went so far as to call for an end to the withdrawal by Protestants from mixed towns and areas.
"When Roman Catholics move into some areas, Protestants seem to cease to buy houses in those areas.
Roman Catholics, on the other hand, appear to be more willing to buy homes in what are Protestant areas than vice versa," he said.
"If we are not prepared to be enriched by proximity and interaction with people who are different, have we any future here other than in diminished and frozen isolation?"
The Rev Dunlop's dejection must be underscored every time there is a European election. Here, the North's ordinary unionists are free, in the secrecy of the voting booth, to choose whoever they like. A majority always supports Ian Paisley.
Slowly, and quietly, the British and the Irish governments are coming to the conclusion that no matter how many wreaths the Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast lays at British Army memorials, the unionist community as a whole is incapable of sharing power with nationalists.
Those who gathered at Hillsborough Castle last week are also aware that, while the census figures for the North have been delayed, the latest figures showing the religious divide will be available in January.
The figures are likely to demonstrate that the North no longer has a Protestant majority. Catholics and Protestants will probably come in at about 47 per cent each, with 6 per cent neither, or refusing to say what they are. There is also a fair chance that the Catholic population will be slightly larger than the Protestant.
Either way, the census will cause a massive crisis of confidence within unionism. The peculiar borders of the North were drawn for the specific purpose of creating a Protestant majority in perpetuity, and in this it will have failed demonstrably.
In this context, the wider question of what to do with Northern Ireland will loom large. With Trimble still trying to oust Sinn Féin from the Assembly, it will be clear that unionists are unwilling to share power with nationalists. The notion of reverting to "a Protestant state for a Protestant people" will be plainly non viable, given the demographics. Allowing nationalists to run the state in the face of a unionist boycott -- a mere reversal of the past 80 years -- would also be a recipe for disaster.
Diplomats and politicians in Ireland and Britain will no doubt rack their brains for many weeks in the search for a solution, before someone, almost inevitably at the BBC's Panorama programme, magically uncovers a "secret government document" outlining a plan to implement joint authority.
Joint authority has a number of attractions, but above all it may be the only viable way to keep the lid on the North in the lead-up to the point at which Catholics/nationalists become a majority of those over 18, and for a few years after that.
