If you can, it’s worth listening to BBC Radio Four’s Archive on 4 extended interview with David Trimble. But it is particularly worth listening to the last ten minutes or so, in which he provides an important analysis of how he was dispatched to the boundary by some neat footwork by the Sinn Fein days before the November 2003 Assembly election was to be called.
He talks about what he had thought was a shared understanding that the IICD “had signally failed to change the public mood..” with its previously terse reports…
“Adams and McGuinness knew how important it was that this build public confidence and they deliberately decided not to… I don’t really blame John de Chastelain for creating the debacle, the debacle occurred because Adams and McGuinness wanted a debacle to occur…
Essentially what was happening in this was that Adams and McGuinness were deciding that they would prefer to have Paisley and Robinson as their interlocutors rather than Trimble and others”
It is well worth listening, if not to the whole lot, then the snippet above… [I suspect it may make for some sobering listening for people inside the DUP… since ‘Trimbling’ is appears not to be the only trick in SF’s ‘political playbook of cunning plans’]
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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