Wasn't Tuesday something else? Great television, terrible politics. To prevent us all from wobbling off into the stratosphere like a Cedric Wilson satellite powered by a Peter Robinson rocket, let's see if we can find some factual anchor-points for our analysis of what happened.
1. David Trimble is a smart, legally minded man. No leader survives as long as Trimble has in the shark-pool of unionism if he's not smart, and no-one becomes a university law lecturer if he doesn't understand how the law works. Given this combination of smartness and legal expertise, it is absurd that he should expect the public to believe he didn't know in advance how General de Chastelain would describe what the IRA had done.
Trimble knew the IRA would object to having a detailed catalogue of weaponry presented and he knew the agreement between the two governments required de Chastelain to go along with their wish for confidentiality.
And yet when the general made his announcement, Trimble went puce and pretended to be shocked and angry. Not convincing.
2. David Trimble wants very badly to humiliate republicans. Whether he wants to do this for personal or business reasons is debatable, but he wants to do it. Consider the evidence. He has collapsed the Stormont institutions, on which Sinn Féin's political credibility has been built, four times. A legal man, he has shown total indifference to evidence in the case of those charged in Colombia, and in the case of Stormontgate and the Castlereagh break-in. The fact that allegations have been made against republicans for him is sufficient: they must be true.
With one exception and that in private, he has for years refused to shake hands with any republicans – won't even look them in the eye. And he has refused – illegally – to nominate members of Sinn Féin to the all-Ireland bodies. So naturally he's keen to have a detailed inventory of IRA weapons made public. Nothing to do with unionists sleeping easier in their beds. This is how defeated armies are treated and that's what David Trimble wants to happen to the Irish Republican Army.
3. IRA arms are just like other arms. Mitchel McLaughlin was on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning and John Humphreys was demanding to know why all IRA arms hadn't been destroyed long ago. McLaughlin pointed out that the British army's demilitarisation programme was running behind, that loyalists had not decommissioned and that they had said they didn't intend to, but Humphreys wasn't listening: IRA arms are different, he said, because Sinn Féin are in government. This distinction has carried a lot of weight in radio and TV studios over the past five years. It's probably carried less weight with those unfortunates terrorised or mutilated or shot dead by unionist paramilitaries over the last five years. Murder is murder is murder, and a gun is a gun is a gun.
4. General de Chastelain dresses funny. If Tuesday's events were choreographed, whoever ordered up John de Chastelain's costume should be fired. The Canadian came on in cord trousers, tweed jacket, coloured hanky sprouting from breast pocket. This casual ensemble, allied with his hesitant delivery, made what he said sound oddly off-hand. And who suffered as a result? Well, David Trimble said he and unionists suffered: the general should have been more convincing for their sake. But there is another group, another organisation which would have felt even more disappointed, and that's the IRA. If you're an army and you've inflicted a massive wound on your own military capability, the least you expect is that people will report it with due dignity and significance. That, the general didn't do. I wonder why.
5. David Trimble wants to be Robert De Niro. For too long he's appeared politically puny, had sand kicked in his eyes by the DUP, been called all the nasty names. No more. Yes, he talked to republicans, but so what? When it came to the crunch, he didn't run away like the DUP, did he?
At the last minute he stood up from the table, eye-balled P O'Neill and said 'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?' The way Trimble sees it, republicans will be so eager to seize the electoral and executive prize almost within their grasp, the IRA will bend the knee and allow a catalogue of what's been destroyed to be made public.
If they do, unionist voters will decide that under that schoolmasterly manner, behind all that opera-loving, David Trimble is one very hard man who has done what every unionist leader failed to do for thirty years and more: he has brought the IRA to its knees.
