David Trimble and Seamus Mallon – the day two men stood together to bring peace

Posted by Jim on March 3, 2023

As we approach the 25th anniversary of Good Friday Agreement, David Kerr, a former special adviser to David Trimble and director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party during the talks leading up to the deal, reflects on the chaotic and violent events which marred the start of 1998. This led to the tragic and watershed moment in early March, with the murders of two best friends in a bar in Poyntzpass, Co Armagh

David Trimble and Seamus Mallon in Poyntzpass in March 1998 with Tommy Canavan, brother of Railway Bar owner.

Belfast Telegraph

Today at 01:00

They say history repeats itself. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

In the months before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, it certainly felt like history was repeating itself, as we stumbled from one crisis to another in Northern Ireland.

Almost every day, there were vicious political arguments. We were supposed to have ceasefires, but it felt like the familiar cycles of violence and political stalemate that we had known all our lives.

Prior to Christmas 1997, loyalist prisoners in the Maze were already questioning the direction and purpose of the talks process. As the gunshots rang out in the prison yard, beside H-Block 6 on December 27, 1997, and LVF leader Billy Wright lay fatally wounded, a new and deadly series of events would unfold that threatened to derail the talks and the loyalist ceasefires.

By the end of January 1998, several people had been killed by loyalists in retaliation for Wright’s murder. Many more were injured and severely traumatised. The political representatives of the UFF, the UDP, decided to withdraw from the talks before being formally suspended. They were excluded for three weeks.

As if not wanting to miss out on the mayhem, in February, the IRA murdered a prominent loyalist in south Belfast.

They also brazenly murdered another man on the Lisburn Road in Belfast, yards from the police station. Based on intelligence assessments from the Chief Constable, Sinn Fein was then also suspended from the talks process for over two weeks.

So concerned was the UUP’s talks team about the fragility of the loyalist ceasefires, David Trimble proactively decided to meet with loyalist prisoners in the Maze to urge them to stick with the process and give it a chance.

If either the UVF-linked PUP, or UDA/UFF-linked UDP left the talks, the negotiations would have collapsed.

Under the rules of sufficient consensus governing the talks, and due to the fact that the UUP only had 46% of the unionist votes cast in the 1996 Forum election (and because the DUP had walked out), the UUP needed both of the small loyalist parties to ratify any potential political agreement.

David Trimble’s visit to the Maze was quickly followed by Secretary of State Mo Mowlam, and it appeared something resembling a sense of calm had been restored within the main loyalist paramilitary groups.

In parallel to this, despite the best efforts of the UK and Irish governments to relocate the multi-party talks for a week to London in January, and to Dublin in February 1998, there was no cohesion or political direction to the negotiations.

The UUP exited the London round of talks with Jeffrey Donaldson ripping up a copy of the 1995 Frameworks document and lambasting the Irish government for negligently publishing the home address of Sir Reg Empey on a document.

As if the political situation wasn’t complicated enough, it was clear there were organised terrorists on both sides, strategically determined to collapse the talks.

The LVF was totally opposed to the political negotiations and had no ceasefire in place.

The situation within the IRA was much more complex.

On February 23, 1998, we received a call that a large car bomb had detonated in the centre of Portadown, in the heart of David Trimble’s constituency. David and I were driven to the scene where we met our party colleague, Mark Neale, to assess the damage.

We had our suspicions that the attack and an identical bombing in Moira (the home of fellow UUP negotiator Jeffrey Donaldson) days earlier, had been very deliberate.

Even though there were no bilateral meetings between the UUP and Sinn Fein at any stage before Good Friday 1998, we knew there were many within the IRA who feared the constitutional outcome from a deal would be unsellable to their base.

While some within loyalism were paranoid about what might happen, we believed a lot of people within the IRA wanted the talks to collapse and the best way for this to happen, from their perspective, would be to force the UUP to walk out.

So, who better to put direct pressure onto, other than Trimble and Donaldson, by putting bombs in their constituencies?

As David Trimble finished a short press conference in front of the bomb scene in Portadown town centre, on that grim February afternoon, a number of people arrived, men who we knew to be linked to the LVF.

“Get out of them f***ing talks now!” shouted Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton, the infamous LVF associate of Billy Wright. To his credit, David remained stoically composed. We were facing dangerous and extremely violent people on both sides. The only thing they had in common was a desire for the conflict to continue.

As we made our way back from Portadown to Stormont, we knew time was running out.

The talks chairman, US Senator George Mitchell, was exasperated. He told us that if there was no deal by April 9, the process would be over.

We couldn’t blame him. The negotiations had been running for almost two years and despite a skeleton ‘Heads of Agreement’ being agreed in January 1998, the talks were going nowhere. When the news broke on March 3, 1998, that two young men, Catholic Damien Trainor and his best mate Philip Allen, a Protestant, had been murdered by the LVF in a gun attack on a bar in Poyntzpass, I could sense, for the first time, David’s despair.

The attack had taken place in Seamus Mallon’s parish.

He was speaking to the media the following day at the scene when David arrived.

Seamus asked David to join him. He later explained what had happened to David’s biographer, Dean Godson. He said they went to Allen’s house and then David said: “I’ll walk to the next house (Trainor’s).”

Seamus replied: “Let’s walk together. People here will be glad to see us together.”

And they certainly were. As the two men spoke to the media side by side, in a hugely symbolic show of political and civic unity, David didn’t hold back.

He was visibly emotional.

“I am ashamed to think the perpetrators of this deed were Protestant. They were serving no cause and on behalf of the unionist community, I repudiate them,” he said.

As they left the scene, I would later realise something profound had happened that day. The SDLP’s Mark Durkan would point to the images of both men together as being the spark that created the idea for a first minister and deputy first minister. What I knew was that there was a new sense of determination and grit within the UUP and SDLP. This couldn’t go on. Something had to be done.

Within weeks, Trimble and Mallon would spearhead the negotiating teams of the UUP and SDLP respectively.

Against all odds, they would forge an agreement and personally take responsibility for leading a new Assembly as first minister and deputy first minster.

Together, they would take Northern Ireland into a transformed political dispensation, changing the course of history here forever.