Tributes to the courage of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former leader of the then-ruling Ulster Unionist Party, who became Northern Ireland’s inaugural first 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 was “enormous. It wouldn’t have happened without him.” Former US President Bill Clinton, whose eleventh-hour phone calls to Trimble and other key figures saved the deal, said: “At times during the negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, he made the hard choices against politically expedient because they believed that future generations should grow up free of violence and hatred.” A barrister by training, known as shy and determined, if sometimes prickly and with a fierce temper, Trimble called the Good Friday Agreement – which marks 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 militants fighting to keep the region part of the United Kingdom. While lingering divisions remain, with the institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement currently paralyzed in a political row over post-Brexit trade arrangements, the agreement marked a watershed moment. “David faced enormous challenges when he led the Ulster unionist party in the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement and convinced his party to sign up to it,” Gerry Adams said. As leader of Sinn Féin—then widely seen as the political wing of the paramilitary IRA—Adams was key to securing hard-line democratic support for the deal. Trimble’s contribution “can’t be understated,” Adams said, adding that the two met several times and got to know each other quite well. Trimble threw down the gauntlet in 1997 when he narrowly won his party’s power-sharing deal even before the IRA decommissioned its weapons. He told the Sinn Féin leader: “We did everything we could. Mr. Adams, you are done. We have jumped. you follow.” From left: Gerry Adams, John Hume, Bill Clinton and David Trimble at the White House in March 2000 © Susan Walsh/AP Bertie Ahern, the Ireland manager at the time of the deal, said simply: “If David hadn’t brought the [Ulster] Unionist party with him, then we didn’t have an agreement”. In sentiments echoed by politicians of all stripes across the region and in 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 biggest pro-UK force in Northern Ireland, hailed Trimble’s determination despite the “significant risk to his security . . . Undoubtedly we can say that he shaped the history of our country.” Lord Peter Mandelson, Labour’s former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said Trimble faced “pain and controversy” in implementing the deal. “Throughout, he faced endless attack from people in his community — I know because we faced many of those audiences together — and ultimately he didn’t budge. He was a courageous man who earned his place in history.” A wry-humored canal boater who loved Elvis Presley and Wagner, Trimble started in politics with the small loyalist Vanguard party in the 1970s. His career took off after he was elected to Westminster for the UUP in 1990. He gained prominence leading the controversial Drumcree parade by the loyalist Orange Order in 1995. After clashes in previous years, the parade went ahead after a tense standoff and Trimble joined hands in the air with then DUP leader Ian Paisley in what seen by some as a triumphant gesture. He became the surprise leader of the UUP later that year, eventually charting a path from hardliner to peacemaker. 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 UUP support collapsed, prompting him to resign as party leader. Trimble backed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, which sparked the current political row. In May, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph that it was “London’s responsibility to protect the future of Northern Ireland and replace this damaging protocol which is dividing the community” – a reference to the controversial trade arrangements for Northern Ireland. Accepting the Nobel Prize in 1998, which he shared with John Hume, the late leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labor party, Trimble said he was sometimes accused of not having “the vision”. He greeted “powerful politicians . . . who seek to make a working peace, not in some perfect world, which never existed, but in this, flawed world, which is our only laboratory.”
