David Trimble: book excerpt from his biography written by News Letter political editor Henry McDonald describes the dark, blood-soaked weeks before the Belfast Agreement

Relations between Trimble and the British government though soured in late February when Mo Mowlam announced Sinn Fein would be allowed to re-enter talks on March 9 following their temporary suspension from the negotiations due to IRA violence in Belfast.

Before he flew off to the United States for a break from the talks, chairman George Mitchell imposed a deadline for the discussions – Thursday, April 9.

Mitchell said he had been studying the calendar to find an appropriate date: “Easter weekend leapt out at me. It had historical significance in Ireland. It was an important weekend in Northern Ireland, a religious society. If there were an agreement by Easter there could be a referendum in late May and an Assembly election in late June.”

However, any agreement seemed a remote possibility while the killings continued. On March 3 news came through of a double murder in Poyntzpass, a village on the ‘border’ between Trimble’s Upper Bann constituency and Newry/Armagh, the area that Seamus Mallon represented in Parliament.

The Loyalist Volunteer Force – the terror group originally formed by the late Billy Wright – shot dead two lifelong friends in a local pub.

One of the victims, Phillip Allen was a Protestant, the other, Damien Trainor, a Catholic.

The following day Trimble and Mallon, two one-time political rivals, went to the village together and visited the Allen and Trainor families. Trimble told reporters that he was ashamed Protestants had been responsible for the double killing. Friends of the UUP leader claimed Trimble was particularly touched by the murders given that the two victims’ friendship has survived nearly 30 years of sectarian terror and bigotry. Not long after many commentators saw Trimble and Mallon as the new axis on which a lasting political settlement could be based.

Ten days later Trimble and his deputy John Taylor flew to Washington for a series of meetings with Bill Clinton, members of Congress and the US media. Although determined now to reach a deal at Stormont, Trimble warned Americans on St Patrick’s Day that there were serious problems to overcome. Addressing the National Press Club in DC, he spoke of the need for a strong vote in favour of any settlement that the talks might produce. He even suggested that the deal might require 85% majority support in the May referendum. This of course reflected long-held anxiety about a deal being imposed without unionist consent.

Trimble had helped bring down the last major constitutional settlement, the Sunningdale power-sharing initiative in 1974. One of the reasons he had opposed that agreement was that its content had never been put to the electorate of Northern Ireland in a referendum. This time he was determined that any long-term deal would be anchored in a referendum which commanded the support of most unionists.

His speech also focused on his other major concern – not to repeat Faulkner’s mistake of accepting a Council of Ireland outside the control of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

“We will not have a third centre of government on the island of Ireland. This is the rock upon which things might founder,” he warned the gathering of US journalists.

Trimble’s visit to the United States illuminated the changing nature of Ulster Unionism’s attitude to foreign involvement in Northern Ireland. Jim Molyneaux, his predecessor as UUP leader, would never have accepted any American involvement in political initiatives to solve the Irish question. Now Trimble had a well-run Unionist Information Office in Washington and was winning new friends and financial backers across the USA.

Trimble even took time out to visit the one American politician who had promoted Irish nationalist interests on Capitol Hill in the early 1970s and had consequently become a bugbear for unionists, Senator Edward Kennedy.

It was clearly a sign of changing times if the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and his deputy were prepared to hold discussions on the talks at Stormont with a man whom unionists had once loathed and regarded as interfering, partial and partisan.

When he walked into the White House itself to shake Bill Clinton’s hand, Trimble had a present for the president.

It was a book on the IRA by Malachi O’Doherty, a journalist who had been deeply critical of armed republicanism. ‘The Trouble with Guns’ casts a sceptical eye over the IRA’s peace strategy and deconstructs many of the myths surrounding Irish republicanism. Republicans detest this highly acclaimed book because they see it as an intellectual challenge to their most precious ideological assumptions.

When Trimble handed the book to Clinton he informed the president that this was a key work on the modern IRA, adding that he hoped he might learn a few home truths about the IRA – such as their continuation of so-called punishment beatings and shootings – beyond the misty-eyed, romantic lionising of Gerry Adams et al.

The upshot of the White House meeting was that Clinton managed to persuade Trimble and later John Hume to hold face-to-face discussions on the talks when they returned to Northern Ireland. The two party leaders had not met for over three months and during separate meetings with them Clinton expressed concern that this was sending out negative signals to the public back home.

Overall, the Washington trip had been reasonably successful from Trimble’s viewpoint. Bertie Ahern was also in the US capital for St Patrick’s Day, and during his address he bluntly told Sinn Fein that there was going to be an Assembly in Belfast despite their objections. Privately, Trimble and his talks team were pleased that Ahern’s remarks caused even more discomfort for Sinn Fein. Now he had to go home to face down his internal critics in the UUP’s 860-strong ruling council.

• In a further extract from ‘Trimble’ in tomorrow’s News Letter: how the deal was done and the Belfast Agreement was born