David Trimble: Rows with NIO over flight home from Europe after Omagh

Lord Trimble’s communications advisor Ray Hayden was relaxing at home on Saturday afternoon August 15 1998, chilling out after several gruelling months of campaigning. He was thinking of his summer holiday in Vancouver when a news flash interrupted normal television programmes shortly before half past three. The announcer said there were reports of a bombing in Omagh, and it was understood there were fatalities.

A second news bulletin said there were now at least four dead with the death toll likely to rise.

Hayden knew he had to act fast. He phoned several UUP Assembly members and party officers, but no one had a contact number for Lord Trimble who was somewhere on holiday in Germany.

Eventually Hayden tracked down Trimble’s new chief-of-staff David Campbell who had a telephone number for a guest-house in the Mosel Valley.

It would be eight o’clock in the evening before Hayden was able to deliver the terrible news about the massive car bomb in Omagh. As first minister, Hayden said, he would have to come home. Until then Ken Maginnis would hold the line, conducting a marathon session of television and radio interviews from the scene of the atrocity.

The next problem for Hayden was the logistics of getting Trimble home. “I told him we would whisk him and his family out of Europe as fast as possible and the NIO would pick up tab for it.”

Hayden opened negotiations with the NIO which the PR man said degenerated into a shouting match with him and Lord Maginnis on one side and senior NIO officials on the other.

Trimble’s men demanded a chartered jet which the NIO refused, and then suggested the RAF might be able to transport him to Northern Ireland once he got onto a cross Channel ferry. When the RAF said they had no spare aircraft in southern England the NIO eventually agreed to hire a private plane from the Isle of Man which would fly to a rendezvous point near Dover.

Hayden remembered the fractious meeting with the NIO: “I found them most unhelpful and I laid into a couple of them during the negotiations. I told them that David was the f****** prime minister of Northern Ireland, and I couldn’t understand why they found it impossible to get him back to respond to one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles.”

Trimble himself was relieved to have been tracked down because from Sunday morning onwards he was planning to drive from Germany into France, and until late that evening would have been incommunicado.

“I would have known nothing about what happened until I reached my flat in London in the early hours of Monday morning. I remember thinking when I heard about Omagh that it was horrendous – that when we all thought we had peace and there were already over 20 people dead in a major bombing incident.”

The chartered light aircraft took three hours to reach Belfast. Hayden met Trimble off the plane and drove him to his home in Lisburn to allow him to freshen up. After showering and changing his clothes, Trimble was driven to Hillsborough Castle where Hayden, David Kerr and Maginnis briefed him before a meeting with the prime minister.

His later meeting with Blair centred on the need for a security crackdown on the Real IRA bombers. Blair agreed immediately.

Maginnis and the first minister insisted that the UK and Irish governments had to have a co-ordinated cross-border strategy to catch those responsible.

Trimble said Blair was in a state of shock having just returned from Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital where he had visited some of the injured.

For Ray Hayden, after months of political turbulence and violence around the Drumcree dispute, this was an overwhelming experience: “It was three o’clock on Monday morning by the time I left David and when I got home, I sat down and cried. A few hours later on the way to the airport for our flights to Vancouver I never issued one word to my wife.”

Trimble too was utterly taken back by the scale of the carnage – 29 men, women and children with one victim, a pregnant mother with nearly full term twins. Hayden said the first minister looked and sounded “devastated” by the massacre.