Monday was Bloomsday a world famous date, 99 years since James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle who was to become his life partner. Joyce marked the occasion with his tale of the Odyssey of Leopold Bloom who meandered around Dublin for a day and ended up more or less in the same place he began.
Nobody now remembers the date of the first Ulster Unionist Council meeting Jeffrey Donaldson called to try to stymie David Trimble and wreck the Good Friday Agreement, but Monday's was the tenth attempt, and like Leopold Bloom no one has travelled very far. Like Leopold Bloom there have been a lot of way stations on the road, though being the UUC, none of them has been a hostelry. The way stations have been events rather than places: entering the executive or not, decommissioning or not, staying in an executive, deadlines, documents, declarations. At the end of each meeting the same result give or take a couple of%: 57-43, 54-46; or give or take 60 or 70 votes out of 800 odd.
Monday's UUC meeting was not 'the defining moment' for unionism billed by Jeffrey Donaldson any more than the previous 10 meetings he engineered. The defining moment for unionism was 30 years ago in 1973 when Harold Wilson's government made it clear to Brian Faulkner, the hard-liner of those days that he would have to share power with nationalists, that unionists could no longer run the north on their own. Like Trimble, unionists had selected Faulkner as their leader because he was a hard-liner, because he'd forced Orange marches through nationalist areas like the Longstone Road near Kilkeel, because he believed in internment.
Like Trimble, Faulkner changed his spots when faced with the reality of British policy, namely 'you run the north the way we tell you, or no unionist gets to run it at all'. Like Trimble, the backwoodsmen who had placed their trust in Faulkner never forgave him when he ate his words and did a U-turn under pressure from London. As they say about Trimble, 'First he turns purple, then he turns turtle.'
Unionism never recovered from the split when they got rid of Faulkner. A substantial chunk of the UUP has never accepted the requirement of sharing power with Fenians as one of its MPs recently confirmed on-air. And so Monday's meeting hasn't changed a thing, hasn't told us anything we didn't know already. Like Leopold Bloom wandering round Dublin, the ageing members of the UUC can totter from venue to venue, from the Ulster Hall to the Waterfront Hall to the Ramada and back again as they have been doing for years, yet they will make no progress.
However Jeffrey Donaldson and his mentors Lord Molyneaux, Martin Smyth and Willie Ross have made some progress. They have managed to seed any future UUP assembly party with anti-agreement members, at least five. It's a fail-safe mechanism. In the unlikely event of an election, any attempt at what Trimble calls a 'reformation of the administration' will fail because the five, with others too perhaps, will make common cause with the DUP and deprive Trimble of unionist consensus in the assembly.
Oh sure, London and Dublin can kid themselves that a First and Deputy First Minister could be elected, and technically it may be possible, but politically it can't happen. Trimble wouldn't get away with it.
On one matter at least Jeffrey Donaldson is absolutely correct: Trimble doesn't represent most unionists. On each occasion David Trimble manages only 54% or 55% support from his own grass roots he proves that he leads only a minority of unionists. In any newly elected forum the DUP and his own dissident assembly members will outvote any attempt he makes to implement the will of the Irish and British governments.
It has become easier all the time. Five years ago unionist people were worried about what would happen if unionist politicians tampered with the mechanisms of the agreement. What if the whole edifice collapsed? Who would get the blame? What would London do? Now we know the answers. Nothing. No blame: no pain. In large measure of course it's Trimble's own fault. He treated the institutions of the agreement with contempt, delayed their establishment as long as he could, never gave them a chance to embed, let alone gain respect. Now his own dissidents are simply following his example and they will continue.
Monday night was just another way station on their odyssey. They are directed by old men who see the defining moment as May 1974 when they conspired to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement. Look out for the European election in 2004.
