17 December 1998 Edition
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''.
Another 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.
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''.
Another 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.