By nature Ulster unionism has always been defensive, tending to throw up leaders who were dogged, stalwart and conservative, rather than imaginative and innovative. David Trimble had seemed to be in that mould, but now he has done what Carson, Craigavon and Brookeborough never would have attempted: he has persuaded his party to change direction towards real compromise and got most of its traditional supporters to take that risk.
Just a week ago memories of the political fate of Brian Faulkner must have been coming back to haunt Trimble. Faulkner's credentials were impeccably hard line: despite his secondary education in Dublin and the way he embraced modernism in the commercial sphere as a minister in the 1960s, he had never been slow to beat the Orange drum, had given a provocative lead in the coat-trailing Longstone Road marches and had played a pivotal role in dragging down Captain O'Neill. Yet by 1973 at Sunningdale he had become convinced of the need for accommodation and change, and the price he paid was political oblivion.
Trimble began his political career in Vanguard, an organisation which for a brief moment seemed to threaten a loyalist coup. His ethnic triumphalism at Drumcree made certain that he was a popular replacement for Molyneaux as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and marked him as a man who could be trusted never to put his name to a sellout. Then, being party to an accord which he argued fiercely kept the Union safe, and having got the support of a comfortable majority in the Ulster Unionist Council, most of his fellow MPs deserted him, the final blow being the decision by the young fogey Jeffrey Donaldson on May 15th to desert the Yes camp, clearly with hopes of supplanting Trimble as leader. Now the decisive acceptance of the Good Friday multi-party agreement will ensure that Trimble will not join those unionists who attempted to lead their people towards accommodation only to be cast to the margins.
Unlike 1973-'74, this time unionist attention has not been directed mainly at the institutions in the agreement but at the prospect of former terrorists wielding power, lack of conviction that illegally held guns can be brought in, the early release of men who bombed, murdered and maimed, and plans to shake up the RUC.
In the end the outcome of this referendum depended on Sinn Fein and on the Ulster Unionist Party. The SDLP had long sought an agreement and no doubt delivered the most enthusiastic Yes votes of all; the PUP and UDP had early indicated their intention to back compromise; Alliance has always fixed its colours to the mast of accommodation; and the DUP had decided on No even before inter-party negotiations had begun. There were acute anxieties about what proportion of their followers the Sinn Fein leaders could take with them, but within hours of the Good Friday accord it became obvious that the fate of the referendum would rest with the traditional supporters of the Ulster Unionist Party.
Northern Ireland is not accustomed to referendums, except in the sense that virtually every general election there since 1921 can be regarded as a referendum on the Union. The region took part in the referendum which brought the UK into the European Union in January 1973. Then, after the suspension of Stormont, the Heath Conservative government arranged to have Border polls every 10 years. The first was held on March 8th, 1973: 591,820 voted in favour of keeping Northern Ireland in the UK and only 6,463 voted against, as a result of a nationalist boycott. Not surprisingly, Jim Prior decided against a second poll in 1983.
It was when Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State were being created that there was an opportunity for a meaningful referendum which might have diminished many of the problems facing governments seeking a lasting resolution today. "I have never heard that orange bitters will mix with Irish whiskey," the Liberal MP Captain T. C. Agar Robartes declared at an early stage in the debates on the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912. He put forward an amendment to partition of the four most Protestant counties in Ulster, but it was decisively rejected. By 1914, however, when Ireland seemed to be lurching inexorably towards civil war both Asquith's Liberal government and the Conservative opposition began to see partition as a way out of the impasse. Their Irish allies would have none of it: "Irish nationalists can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation," the Irish Party leader John Redmond declared, and when he reluctantly agreed to look at government proposals he was let off the hook by Sir Edward Carson, who as a southern unionist by origin, found the very idea of partition repellent. A conference in Buckingham Palace called by George V, seeking "a spirit of generous compromise" found none and futilely, in Churchill's words, "toiled round the muddy byways of Fermanagh and Tyrone".
The first World War altered everything: changes which would have taken decades were telescoped into a few years of mass bloodletting. In the wake of the Easter Rising the Ulster Unionist Council abandoned those in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan who had signed the 1912 Covenant and agreed to seek the partition of the six north-eastern counties as the largest area which the Unionists could comfortably control.
Meanwhile, the balance of power at Westminster was fast shifting in a direction highly favourable to Ulster Unionists achieving their objectives. The formation of coalition governments from 1915 onwards brought into the administration men who had openly supported loyalist armed defiance before the war. Then in 1918 the spectacular triumph of Sinn Fein transformed the political scene. Just as significant was the Liberal collapse which ensured that well over half of Commons members were Conservatives - a circumstance of great assistance to the Ulster Unionists (who themselves had leaped from 18 to 26 ) particularly in view of, as Arthur Balfour put it, "the blessed refusal of Sinn Feiners to take the Oath of Allegiance".
The Belfast Agreement reached on Good Friday this year is designed to set aside the 1920 Government of Ireland Act which created Northern Ireland. That legislation had a remarkably serene passage through Parliament as the Anglo-Irish war got under way and as Derry, Belfast, Lisburn and Banbridge were convulsed by sectarian strife. Ulster Unionists complained about getting a devolved arrangement which they had not asked for, but in no time at all they were to be found cherishing a local parliament as a bulwark against possible future attempts by Westminster to reunite the island, and, above all, they got the full six counties.
Referendums, then generally referred to as plebiscites, formed a key element in the treaties made at the Paris Peace Conference which followed the cataclysm of the first World War. That conference played no part in the making of constitutional structures for Ireland in 1920-'21, yet the post-war treaties profoundly influenced the 1920 Act and the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty.
More conscientiously than ever before the statesmen in Paris attempted to give every nationality a state of its own. A glance at the ethnic map of Europe of the time indicates the extreme difficulty of putting this aim into practice even if another unwritten aim, that of rewarding the victors, is set aside. When it came to fine-tuning the European settlement partition seemed the only acceptable solution. The difference between Ireland and the European mainland was that the exact positioning of new frontiers in the peace settlement was to be agreed only after holding referendums in, for example, Upper Silesia, Schleswig, Marienwerder and Allenstein to finalise Germany's new borders with Poland, Denmark and Czechoslovakia.
Partition, then, was the flavour of the time, but when it came to Ireland there was no referendum even after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which provided for a boundary commission. It seems extraordinary now that Griffith and his team did not insist on independent commissioners and a plebiscite as elsewhere in Europe. When it finally got going in November 1924 the Irish Boundary Commission merely pulled out the 1911 census map, conveniently coloured in orange and green to show where Protestants and Catholics had local majorities. The slack wording of Article 12 of the Treaty set the commission the task of determining, "in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland ". The chairman, Richard Feetham, placed economic and geographic considerations well to the fore which suited the Northern Ireland representative very well indeed. Poor Eoin MacNeill was outvoted and when the findings were leaked to the press it was revealed that only trifling border alterations were envisaged. MacNeill resigned and the embarrassed Cosgrave government agreed to suppress the report.
What would have happened if the Irish Boundary Commission had been made up of independent commissioners appointed by the League of Nations and made its recommendations based on a referendum solely concerned to find out the wishes of the inhabitants? It would have been impractical to hive off the Glens of Antrim or west Belfast but certainly south Armagh, significant slices of Tyrone, generous fillets of south and west Fermanagh, a chunk made up of most of the Mourne Mountains and probably Derry city and Newry would have been assigned justifiably to the Irish Free State. Contrary to the predictions of Griffith and Collins, a Northern Ireland pruned down in this way would have been perfectly viable. And with a smaller proportion of Catholics in the region the erosion of the Ulster Protestant sense of being besieged might have begun and "normal" left-right cross-community politics would have had a better chance. At central and local government levels the urge to manipulate electoral boundaries and distribute jobs and houses unfairly would have been reduced. And south of a revised border, with a higher proportion of Protestants to look after, Cosgrave and de Valera might have been more cautious about creating a quasi-theocratic state.
So it was that, with a large resentful minority comprising one-third of the inhabitants seeking nothing less than the demise of the state, Northern Ireland bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to many of the successor states of collapsed empires in central and eastern Europe. Just as surely as in Thrace, Istria, Transylvania, the Sudetenland, Macedonia and the Polish corridor, in Northern Ireland memories of triumphs and defeats, massacres and dispossessions, and persecutions and insults had a perfect microclimate in which to flourish and fester. Distracted by imperial troubles and domestic anxieties, the London government took its eye off the ball and Unionist governments were able to use their democratically won unassailable majorities to foster the unfairnesses which led finally to the explosion of 1968-'69.
Having kept themselves in a woeful state of ignorance for so long, Westminster governments had to take crash courses in an attempt to understand the intricacies of the Northern Ireland imbroglio. For three fateful years they hesitated to invoke the 1920 Act and impose direct rule. When Heath bowed to the inevitable in 1972, he concluded that what was needed was a local power-sharing assembly and administration with the enhanced cross-border activity envisaged in the 1920 Act. By 1973 the Dublin government also agreed that this formula was the answer and, with differences in emphases over a quarter of a century, London and Dublin have stuck to that blueprint - hence Seamus Mallon's observation earlier this year that the agreement would be "Sunningdale for slow learners".
This time the two governments have worked frantically to get a multi-party accord which would not unravel as Sunningdale did. The referendum was a bit like the Bill for Union in 1799-1800: a simple majority is not quite enough to make it stick.
Now the agreement has got the support of more than 71 per cent of voters which must mean the backing of a majority of Protestants - and this in spite of the rapturous reception given to high profile prisoners at the Sinn Fein ardfheis having lost possible Yes votes by the cartload.
How were rather more than 50 per cent of Protestants persuaded to take the risk of supporting the accord? Rank and file unionists were unquestionably impressed by the energy and attention Tony Blair put into the campaign. Respectable Protestants of all classes, often fastidiously steering clear of grubby local politics, felt challenged when they saw so many busy and important people including Bono, Richard Branson, Paddy Ashdown and President Clinton put themselves out for them. It would be bad manners not to respond.
Severely shaken by the economic dislocation arising from the end of the ceasefire and staring into the abyss in the summer of 1996, the business community has had the courage to put its head above the parapet and urge acceptance of the accord. Arguments about regeneration, inward investment and the revival of the tourist industry have been listened to for a change. Tempted to go south by the gap between the pound and the punt, many Protestants have become acquainted with the Celtic Tiger for the first time.
They become aware that the Hierarchy's authority is in irreversible decline by news of the Bishop Casey, Brendan Smyth and other cases, and by the outcome of the divorce referendum.
Nevertheless at least 45 per cent of Protestants voted No. The propensity to say No is buried deep in the loyalist psyche and it will not easily be dissolved in the crucial weeks leading up to June 25th.
The passion to be seen as British and to remain indissolubly linked with Britain is at the same time accompanied by a centuries-old distrust of British governments. Their forebears were enticed to settle in a province which they had been told was depopulated; finding it seething with resentful, dispossessed natives, they endured attacks and massacres and though they were not slow to reply in kind, again and again they had to look to their own defence; and bitter experience taught them to be vigilant lest for the sake of expediency London might be tempted to compromise with the enemy.
In central Belfast there stands an imposing statue of Rev Dr Henry Cooke, still called the "Black Man" though thanks to clean air legislation the monument now has a pleasing verdigris patina. Cooke brought Presbyterians and Anglicans together to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism, then represented by O'Connell's demand for repeal of the Union. At a Conservative mass meeting at Hillsborough in 1834 Cooke described repeal as "just a discreet word for Romish ascendancy and Protestant extermination". Cooke was the founder of Ulster unionism and while some reasons for hanging on to the umbilical cord with Britain have since disappeared the gut hostility to rule by representatives of the Catholic majority on the island has remained constant.
In Northern Ireland Britain has on her doorstep a society so deeply divided that it invites comparisons with the Balkans. Like Serbs, Croats and Muslims, northern Catholics and Protestants speak the same language and (though loathe to admit it) have intermarried for generations, but they are separated by religious affiliation and cultural traditions. Ulster Catholics are now completely confident in their cultural identity, sometimes raucously flaunted. Ulster Protestants feel increasingly that their identity is under threat and unacknowledged by the British government. In the agreement, for example, Irish is given a status which some feel should also be accorded to Ulster Scots (Ullans).
For all the flamboyance and braggadocio of Orange marches, northern Protestants have always seen themselves as being on the defensive. It was not until 1871 that Protestants formed a majority in the historic province of Ulster and that only lasted a few decades. Demographers point to sharp falls in the Catholic birth rate, but Protestants see that apart from the tiny Fountain enclave the whole of the left bank of the Foyle has become Catholic, that in Belfast the area marked by fluttering tricolours on the lower Ormeau keeps growing and that what were isolated islands of Catholicism such as Ardoyne have fused to create a green swathe encircling north Belfast. Northern Ireland has the most draconian fair employment legislation in the western world and this is to some Protestants another outward and visible sign of their emasculation. Feeling that they are the ones who are always being asked to make the concessions, Protestants who voted No will have done so to draw a line indicating to the British government that they won't give more.
These are weighty concerns for Trimble to address in the month to come. At least he can do this now from a position of strength. He appeared a statesman to be proud of when he comprehensively routed Robert MacCartney in television debate and, even more so, when - incongruous in suit and tie at a pop concert - he seized the hand of another statesman, John Hume. People then really did want to give peace a chance.
Jonathan Bardon is the author of A History of Ulster published by Blackstaff Press. He is chairman of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council.