Ben Lowry: I was pleased to attend a fascinating talk in Limavady by Dean Godson, a great friend of unionism

I have reported or edited stories about Limavady over the years but on Monday I finally got to see this town with its pleasingly wide central streets, surrounded by fine countryside along the River Roe.

The reason for my visit was a fascinating talk about unionism by Dean Godson, a Conservative peer who runs an influential centre right think-tank in Westminster.

Lord Godson, who wrote an acclaimed 1,000 page biography of David Trimble, was delivering the David Brewster Memorial Lecture, the first third of which was about Mr Brewster, a proud Limavady man who died in 2022 aged only 56.

Referring to the young unionist Aaron Callan’s description of Mr Brewster as “a thinker, unionist, historian, Orangeman, Presbyterian, organiser, solicitor, leader”, Lord Godson said he wanted to focus on unionism and the loyal orders which were so central to his life.

“David Brewster, although he broke with Trimble over the Good Friday Agreement and the concessions on early release of terrorists and the destruction of the RUC, was well aware that simply rejecting change was not enough.”

Lord Godson moved into the middle third of his talk, which was about the scandal of legacy, with the following passage: "When he arrived in Queen’s University to study law in the early 1980s, David was a student of Edgar Graham’s and, according to Mark Dingwall, Edgar’s murder cemented his activism in the Ulster Unionist students’ organisation at Queen’s in those most difficult years as the the IRA and Sinn Fein became rampant on the back of the hunger strikes.

“When what Kevin Myers has terms ‘collusionology’ dominates debates on who was responsible for the Troubles, and ‘collusion has been used as a smokescreen to obscure the overwhelming responsibility of terrorist organisations for the vast majority of those killed and injured during the Troubles, it is important to register the collusive role played by an IRA supporter in Queen’s law department in setting up Edgar Graham for murder.”

Lord Godson spoke about the recent way in which “memory activists on the nationalist side have been able to rely on the British government sponsored reports and investigations for legitimisation”.

One of the many parts of the talk that I listened to with great satisfaction was when Lord Godson, talking about the government’s proposals for an official history of the Troubles, said: “The Kenova report into the agent ‘Stakeknife’, which has cost up to now nearly £40 million, has resulted in no prosecutions and led to the overwhelming media consensus that ‘British spy in IRA cost more lives than it saved’. It is hard not to conclude that historians with access to all the material that Jon Boutcher had, as well as a brief to consider the full context going back years and following the outworking of intelligence penetration of the Provisionals, would not have come up with such a contentious and lame conclusion.”

The final third of his talk was on what Lord Godson sees as the importance of unionist unity at this difficult time for supporters of the UK. Our news report on Tuesday focused on that part of the talk, and Lord Godson peer wrote a 1,200 word essay for this newspaper based on it (to which the web version of the essay will link).

Among various ideas as to the way forward, the lecture referred an essay I wrote over the Easter weekend saying that the Jeffrey Donaldson resignation might kickstart a realignment within unionism. I was thinking of a division into two groups, one liberal and one more conservative, rather than the current three, but Lord Godson is thinking more in terms of a single unionist entity, a coming together of the Ulster Unionist Party and DUP. He cited a talk given by the Dublin-based commentator Eoghan Harris to an Ulster Unionist Party even in the Ulster Reform Club in 2007, which we were the only newspaper to attend and first to report, on our front page. Mr Harris called for a single party.

Under the banner headline ‘Time to disappear, speaker tells UUP’, on September 29 of that year, we reported Mr Harris, a former left-wing activist, saying: ''What I am going to suggest will, I am sure, outrage many of you. It's the unionist equivalent, in 2007, to the consternation I evoked in 1989 when I told the Workers Party that it had to embrace liberal capitalism and the market economy or die.

''For what I am suggesting is that there no longer is a real foundation for the continued existence of two unionist parties and that, from a position of relative strength, you should approach the DUP about the creation of a new united unionist party.”

Lord Godson made his own updated observation that currently “there are no manifest differences between the DUP and the UUP in policy terms. There is only one winner from their quarrel – the Alliance”.

I was reminded on Monday evening how fortunate unionism is to have a friend such as Dean Godson, a passionate believer in our cause. He was opposed to the Belfast Agreement but thinks changes in NI since then mean the deal will become a safeguard for unionism.

There is too much in what he said to respond to in this space. I do agree that London has shifted decisively in favour of unionism – albeit late in the day – and that the “moral, legal, political and practical” commitments to the Union in the Safeguarding the Union document are very welcome. But I see real problems in the way the DUP has responded to that deal, confusing the unionist rank and file into thinking there is no Irish Sea border when almost daily we report on its emerging implications.

I also think that supporting the deal has led to hesitation among MLAs who need to challenge the border. A it leads enemies of unionism in Brussels, Washington and across this island to think that unionists will accept almost anything. It is why I think of a unionist division into two broad groupings is best.

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