For David Trimble, it was the Year of the Heaves. The UUP leader has long had to put up with the refusenik wing of his own party, but during the past twelve months they edged closer and closer to their eventual goal of toppling him. The dissidents politics seem curiously shallow has Jeffrey Donaldson, for instance, given any thought to where he would actually lead the party, or is he just suffering from a case of blind ambition?
Trimble is partly to blame himself, mind you where the Adams/McGuinness leadership has assiduously prepared its base for each step down the peace process path, and sold those steps as either a victory or a cunning strategy, Trimble has always seemed recalcitrant. There has been barely a mention of the Good Friday Agreement s benefits to Unionism (SF in a partitionist assembly, an end to the Provos armed campaign, and the greater prosperity which will inevitably result). This has left rich propaganda pickings for the doom-mongers. Furthermore, Trimble s tendency to accede to dissident demands may haunt him in the months to come.
Loyalism s fundamentalist fringes also got the spotlight turned their way during the year. The DUP were boosted by Rev. William McCrea s by-election victory in south Antrim. Overturning a huge UUP majority represented sweet revenge for the man who, as the sitting MP for Mid-Ulster, was beaten by Martin McGuinness in 1997. McCrea and his fellow Paisleyites gloatingly predicted the UUP would face electoral meltdown at the next general election. They aren t necessarily wrong. . .
On the other side of the divide, the Sinn Fein leadership was still engaged in the effort to keep a restive base on-message . The RIRA began recruiting again, as the unspeakable horror of Omagh apparently faded in the memory. At a subtler level, awkward questions were being asked by previously loyal members of the Republican Movement; the October murder of RIRA man Joseph O Connor in Ballymurphy seemed to focus dissent rather than crush it. The year closed with an IRA statement which spoke darkly of frustrations with the pace of change.
The real internecine blood-letting came on the loyalist side. Most observers traced the feud which developed between the UVF and UDA to the release of Johnny Mad Dog Adair from prison. The early autumn was marked by tit-for-tat killing between the two groups, in the process causing a pall of fear unlike anything in recent years to settle over the Shankill Road area. Even now, only an uneasy peace has been established between the two organisations.
In the SDLP, little changed. The party s main concerns continue to be staving off the rise of the Shinners, and wondering about the retirement plans of St John of Hume. Hume has now decided to give up his Assembly seat, but whether he will continue to lead the party, and what his plans are in his Westminster constituency, both remain unknown. Meanwhile, Gerry and Martin, internal tensions aside, just keep movin on up the polls.
One of the north s most moving stories was only tangentially related to sectarian goings-on. The odious Vincent McKenna, self-appointed head of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau, was convicted of sexually abusing his daughter. Sorcha McKenna s bravery in pursuing her father s prosecution and dropping her own right to anonymity so that he could be identified was immense. Northern politicians may have more courage than most, but, as the year drew to a close, the depth of her heroism put them all in the shade.