Lord David Trimble, a key architect of the Good Friday Agreement who defied opposition from his community to help secure peace in Northern Ireland almost a quarter of a century ago, has died after a short illness. He was 77 years old.
Tributes to the courage of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former leader of the then-dominant Ulster Unionist Party, who became Northern Ireland’s inaugural prime minister after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, poured in after his death on Monday.
Sir Tony Blair, the UK prime minister who signed the peace deal, said Trimble’s contribution had been “immense. Without him it wouldn’t have happened”.
Former US President Bill Clinton, whose phone calls to Trimble and other key figures rescued the deal, said: “Time after time, during the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement , he made the most difficult decisions than the politically expedient ones because he believed that future generations should grow up free of violence and hatred.”
A lawyer by training, known as shy and determined, if sometimes prickly and with a fierce temper, Trimble called the Good Friday Agreement, which celebrates its 25th anniversary next April, “the greatest thing in my life.”
The deal ended three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland between nationalist paramilitaries fighting to end British rule and loyalist gunmen fighting to keep the region part of the United Kingdom.
Although divisions persist, with the institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement currently mired in a political row over post-Brexit trade deals, the deal marked a pivotal moment.
“David faced huge challenges when he led the Ulster Unionist party in the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and persuaded his party to sign up to it,” said Gerry Adams. As leader of Sinn Féin – then widely regarded as the political wing of the paramilitary IRA – Adams was key to securing hard-line republican support for the deal.
Trimble’s contribution “can’t be understated,” Adams said, adding that the two met many times and got to know each other quite well.
Trimble threw down the gauntlet in 1997, when he secured his party’s power-sharing deal even before the IRA pulled its weapons. He told the Sinn Féin leader: “We have done our bit. Mr. Adams, you are finished. We jumped; you continue.”
From left: Gerry Adams, John Hume, Bill Clinton and David Trimble at the White House in March 2000 © Susan Walsh/AP
Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach of Ireland at the time of the deal, said simply: “If David did not bring the [Ulster] Unionist party with him, then we didn’t have an agreement”.
Echoing the sentiments of politicians across the region and Ireland, Michael D Higgins, President of Ireland, said Trimble had earned a “distinguished and well-deserved place in our history books”.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who defected from the UUP and whose Democratic Unionist party is now the largest pro-UK force in Northern Ireland, praised Trimble’s determination despite “considerable risk to his security . . . Without a doubt, it can be said that it shaped the history of our country.”
Lord Peter Mandelson, a former Labor secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said Trimble faced “pain and conflict” in implementing the deal.
“Throughout it all, he faced endless onslaught from people in his own community, I know because we faced many of these hearings together, and ultimately he didn’t give in. He was a brave man who has earned its place in history.”
A canal boat enthusiast with a wry sense of humor who adored Elvis Presley and Wagner, Trimble got his start in politics with the small loyalist Vanguard Party in the 1970s. His career began after he was elected to Westminster by the UUP in 1990.
He rose to prominence leading the controversial Drumcree parade of the loyalist Orange Order in 1995. After clashes in previous years, the parade went ahead after a tense standoff and Trimble joined the air with the then leader of the DUP Ian Paisley in what some saw. as a triumphant gesture.
He became the surprise leader of the UUP later that year, eventually charting a path from hardline to pacifist. Trimble’s reward for the peace deal, however, was the loss of his Westminster seat. He was defeated by more than 5,000 votes in 2005 and the UUP’s support collapsed, prompting him to resign as party leader.
Trimble backed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, which sparked the current political standoff. In May, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph that it was “London’s responsibility to safeguard Northern Ireland’s future and replace this damaging and community-divisive protocol”, a reference to the controversial trade deals for Northern Ireland.
In accepting the Nobel Prize in 1998, which was awarded jointly with John Hume, the late leader of the Nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party, Trimble said he was sometimes accused of lacking “vision”.
He greeted “the politicians of the possible. . . who seek to create a working peace, not in a perfect world, which never was, but in this, the defective world, which is our only workshop”.