David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has withdrawn from the British government-organised "review" of the six-year-old Good Friday Agreement. Trimble accuses Blair of "rank moral cowardice" for not expelling Sinn Fein from the review in reprisal for the recent attempt by the IRA to kidnap a man in central Belfast.
Despite the withdrawal, the UUP will continue to "talk" to other parties, including Sinn Fein
Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the biggest of the Unionist parties and traditionally more "hard-line" than the Trimbleites, is not withdrawing from the review. However, unlike the UUP, it refuses to talk to Sinn Fein "directly"
This is the latest piece of evidence that Trimble's shock at the UUP being relegated to the position of second largest Unionist party in the recent election has made him lose his grip.
He has walked out of the review because the IRA tried to kidnap a member of another Republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). INLA is a pseudo-left, umbrella sort of organisation with some truly terrible things in its record, including undisguised sectarian murder.
On a number of occasions it has been engulfed by faction fighting and internecine slaughter. It is widely believed to be infested with all sorts of London and Dublin agents, and at different times to have been used as a tool by those "security services".
Recently it has been denounced by Catholic social workers for meting out savage vigilante "justice" to Catholic young men in Belfast, a number of whom then committed suicide.
If the IRA suppresses the INLA, it will provoke only one question from most Northern Irish Catholics: "Why did you wait so long?"
In principle, Trimble is opposed to any activity by the IRA. Even so, he has had to accept it as fact that the IRA does control Catholic-Nationalist areas in Northern Ireland. The IRA's move against the INLA is a strange issue for Trimble to choose as his "good reason" for abandoning the Good Friday Agreement review.
As a piece of vying in Protestant-Unionist militancy with the Paisleyites, it is singularly inept, evidence of the political disorientation of the ex-First Minister who under the existing rules lost the possibility of again becoming First Minister to Ian Paisley in the December 2003 Northern Ireland elections.
By Jane Ryan
