Irish Examiner view: Trimble occupied a historic but difficult space

David Trimble during an event to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, at Queen's University in Belfast, in 2018. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

The passing of David Trimble at the age of 77 breaks another link with the founding spirits of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought protracted peace to Northern Ireland after nearly 40 years of tension, violence, and recrimination.

Among the departed architects of faith and hope, John Hume will always be remembered for his close collaboration and friendship with the former Ulster Unionist Party leader, which led to the joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998.

Mo Mowlam, the quirky Labour Northern Ireland minister who did much of the spadework in bring protestants and Republicans to the table, gone also. So is Martin McGuinness. David Ervine, the paramilitary bomber who became a loyalist advocate for peace, is also no longer with us.

This reduces by half the leading protagonists in the most important political agreement for Ireland since the creation of the Irish Free State. Of the others, US special envoy George Mitchell is 88; David Andrews, the former Fianna Fáil politician who served as foreign minister is 87; the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern is 70, and Tony Blair is 69.

Of them all, Trimble may have had the most difficult task attempting to keep Orangemen supporting the process despite heavy criticism from his predecessor James Molyneaux and Ian Paisley booming and jeering from the sidelines. When Trimble was pictured with Bono, Paisley sneered “well, he’s rock and rolled with the enemy for long enough”. The Stormont Agreement was, “the greatest betrayal ever foisted by a unionist leader on the unionist people!”

Trimble, who had once manned the barricades at Drumcree’s menacing Orange parades, had to maintain a hardline appearance if he was to bring any prospect of peace. In this he resembled FW de Klerk, the last white, and segregationist, president of South Africa, whose role it also was to usher in a transition that many found impossible to contemplate.

De Klerk was described as occupying “a historic but difficult space” and the same can be said of David Trimble. His leadership of his party and region ended in 2005, as the Ulster Unionists lost their dominant position to Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, jettisoned because they appeared too moderate and willing to compromise. The reverberations of this schism are still being felt today, and provide a backdrop to the argument over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Trimble opposed the protocol and joined a combined unionist challenge to the post-Brexit treaty on the grounds that it breached the Act of Union and the Belfast Agreement.

But on other matters he proved his pragmatism, notably when he said he had changed his position on same sex marriage after his daughter married her girlfriend five years ago.

As the tributes rolled in, many of them from those who know there would have been no Good Friday Agreement without Trimble, and who worry about its future, we are left with our memory of a man who understood politics was the art of the possible. 

He said: “In politics you never totally trust anybody because you never know what is going to happen. Everybody has got his own particular agenda. The main question is: can you work with them?”