Trimble, man of peace in Nireland, dies at 77
Politician who jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in sealing the Good Friday Agreement
Lord Trimble, the former Northern Ireland first minister and architect of the Good Friday Agreement, died yesterday aged 77. The former Ulster Unionist leader had suffered a short illness, a statement released by the party on behalf of his family said. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Northern Ireland peace process and was raised to the peerage in 2006. Boris Johnson described Lord Trimble as “a giant of British and international politics”.
LORD TRIMBLE, the former first minister of Northern Ireland and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has died at age 77, his family announced last night.
The Ulster Unionist Party released a statement on behalf of the Trimble family saying that he had “passed away earlier today following a short illness”.
Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss paid tribute to Lord Trimble at the start of the BBC’S Tory leadership debate last night, describing him as a “political giant”. As David Trimble, the then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party was the first person to hold the office of first minister of Northern Ireland.
With the nationalist politician John Hume, the then leader of the SDLP, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 for his work on the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, which brought to an end the decades-long Troubles in the province and re-established the Stormont devolved parliament. Boris Johnson said: “He was a giant of British and international politics and will be long remembered for his intellect, personal bravery and fierce determination to change politics for the better.”
Former prime minister Sir John Major, who spent years working towards the peace process, said Trimble had made “a brave and principled” change of his party’s policy to enable the agreement, adding: “He thoroughly merits an honourable place among peacemakers.”
Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said he had been a “towering figure of Northern Ireland and British politics”.
Alistair Campbell, who worked for Sir Tony Blair when he signed the agreement as prime minister, said Trimble “could be a difficult and mercurial character but he was the right man in the right place at the right time”.
Trimble was prepared to compromise to get the deal over the line, agreeing that Sinn Fein could take part in the devolved government before the IRA had completed the process of decommissioning its weapons.
Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein leader, expressed his “deep regret” and said: “David faced huge challenges when he led the Ulster Unionist Party in the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and persuaded his party to sign on for it. It is to his credit that he supported that Agreement. I thank him for that.”
Trimble was particularly criticised by the Democratic Unionist Party, and in
‘He chose to grasp the opportunity for peace when it presented itself and sought to end decades of violence’
2005 he lost the Westminster seat he had held since 1990 to the DUP. He resigned the leadership of the UUP, and accepted a life peerage. In 2007 he left the UUP to join the Conservative Party.
Doug Beattie, the current leader of the UUP, said: “David Trimble was a man of courage and vision. He chose to grasp the opportunity for peace when it presented itself and sought to end the decades of violence that blighted his beloved Northern Ireland.”
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was “deeply saddened” and said his thoughts were with Lady Trimble and their four children. He added: “David was a committed and passionate advocate for the Union, at a time when doing so placed a considerable threat to his safety.
Michelle O’neill, the vice president of Sinn Fein, tweeted: “His courage in helping achieve the Good Friday Agreement leaves a legacy ...for which he and his family should be rightly proud.”
LORD TRIMBLE, who has died aged 77, was the Ulster Unionist leader who concluded the 1998 Good Friday agreement that ended three decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and later became First Minister in a power-sharing Executive that included Sinn Fein.
The Agreement brought Trimble the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the SDLP leader John Hume, for whom he had little time. But initial Republican reluctance to adhere to it led to public disenchantment, suspension of the Executive and his party’s eclipse by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists.
Like Brian Faulkner a generation before, David Trimble led Unionists into power-sharing at the eventual cost of his career. Yet he could justly claim to have been the Unionist leader with the vision and determination not just to conclude a settlement involving Republicans, but to hold them to it. By withdrawing from the Executive for three months in 2000 and again the following year, he forced the IRA to take crucial steps toward decommissioning its arsenal and bringing genuine peace.
While power-sharing was halted for four years after the IRA was caught using Sinn Fein’s office at Stormont to monitor potential targets, large-scale violence did not return and the Executive took up its powers again in 2007 – but with the DUP in the lead.
An academic lawyer, the ruddyfaced Trimble combined a good mind and articulate manner with a short fuse. Less charismatic than Paisley, he admitted: “I’m not very good at the evangelical bit. I’m a bit flat, I know. But at least I don’t try to bulls--t people.”
An Orangeman at 17, and originally a member of William Craig’s hardline Ulster Vanguard, he leapfrogged to the Unionist leadership in 1995 over more experienced candidates. The catalyst was that July’s Orange march at Drumcree, in Trimble’s constituency, where he linked arms with Paisley to confront police barring the marchers from their traditional – and provocative – route along the Garvaghy Road.
Trimble declared: “Orangemen have marched along this road for 188 years, so we are not going back the way we came.” He helped to broker an agreement with local Catholics under which a small and restrained group of marchers was allowed through, and found himself a hero. Two years later, the march was banned.
Many – particularly in the Republic – saw his election as leader as perpetuating the intransigent face of Unionism at a time when efforts by John Major’s government to bring Republicans into the process were flagging. Yet within three years Trimble became the first Unionist leader to sit down with Sinn Fein, despite reckoning its president, Gerry Adams, to be “the most appalling human being I have ever met”.
Once what he always termed the “Belfast Agreement” was negotiated, Trimble worked tirelessly to stop Tony Blair’s government making further concessions, keep Unionists behind power-sharing as support trickled away, and demonstrate that the Executive could bring the province real benefits. But by 2005, when he lost his Westminster seat to the DUP, he had run out of road, and resigned as Unionist leader.
Outside politics, Trimble was known for his fascination with Elvis Presley, the most famous descendant of the “Scotch-irish” who settled in Tennessee. On the 30th anniversary of Presley’s death in 1977 he presented a Radio 4 tribute.
William David Trimble was born on October 15 1944, the son of William Trimble, a civil servant, and his wife Ivy. From Bangor Grammar School he took a First in Law at Queen’s University Belfast. Called to the Bar in 1969, he stayed at Queen’s; at the height of the Troubles he went into the H-blocks at Long Kesh to teach one of his Catholic students who had been detained.
Trimble was appointed a senior lecturer in 1977, and from 1980 to 1989 headed the department of Commercial and Property Law. He became acting head of the university’s Institute for Legal Studies, but to his chagrin the permanent job went to a former student, Mary Mcaleese – later president of the Irish Republic.
When Faulkner’s Assembly was elected in 1973, Trimble stood as a Vanguard Unionist. The next year he gave legal advice to the Ulster Workers’ Council, whose Loyalist strikes brought down the original Executive.
In 1975 he was elected to the short-lived Constitutional Convention. This produced agreement between the Unionist parties and the mainly Catholic SDLP which Trimble believed could have delivered a lasting settlement, with Sinn Fein marginalised; but Paisley repudiated it after a split in his Free Presbyterian Church.
For a time Trimble shared Vanguard’s deputy leadership with the Ulster Defence Association’s Glenn Barr. But when the party split over Craig’s support for power-sharing, he sided with the moderates and in 1978 he joined the mainstream Unionists.
The Anglo-irish Agreement of 1985, giving the Republic a role in the affairs of the North, outraged most unionists. Trimble responded by founding the Ulster Clubs, ostensibly concerned with Protestant history, which gave him a locus in the Orange Order despite “never having owned a bowler hat”, as he put it.
In 1990 Trimble was chosen to fight the Upper Bann by-election caused by the death of the popular Unionist MP Harold Mccusker, because of his strong views on security and opposition to the Agreement. He defeated the SDLP by 13,849 votes, a much-hyped Conservative losing her deposit.
When Mrs Thatcher’s Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke tried to convene all-party talks, Trimble rejected claims that the Unionists were blocking them. He blamed the SDLP for imposing conditions about parallel contacts with the Republic.
Re-elected with an increased majority in 1992, Trimble pressed Major’s government to support the Bosnian Muslims as they came under attack from the Serbs, and joined Tory rebels against the Maastricht Treaty. Major became more dependent on Unionist votes as his majority shrank; Trimble tried to increase his bargaining power by voting with Labour in key divisions, but found colleagues reluctant.
Trimble remained sceptical of peace initiatives, especially from President Bill Clinton’s US administration, which he rated “partisan”. He urged the government to halt talks between Hume and Adams, believing they could not advance peace, and when the IRA rejected the Downing Street Declaration designed to bring it into the process, he pressed Major to fill the resulting policy vacuum.
When the IRA called a ceasefire in 1994, he accused the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, of “foolish haste” in meeting Adams. To get to the table, he said, Sinn Fein must accept the principle of consent by the people of Ulster to any settlement.
In August 1995, the veteran Unionist leader James Molyneaux resigned. The charismatic John Taylor was favourite to succeed him while Molyneaux wanted the harder-line William Ross. But Trimble, the youngest of five candidates, defeated Taylor by 466 votes to 333 in the Ulster Unionist Council. He made Taylor (now Lord Kilclooney) his deputy.
Trimble began his leadership by proposing a merger with the DUP – Paisley rejected it – and suggesting severing his party’s formal links with the Orange Order. He told Major, Reynolds’s successor John Bruton – making him the first Unionist leader to meet a Taoiseach in 30 years – and emissaries from Clinton that his nine MPS would only join all-party talks when Sinn Fein faced up to the issue of disarming the IRA.
He met the US president in Belfast that December and again at the White House. Clinton agreed the IRA’S resumption of violence was “damn stupid” and invited him for St Patrick’s Day in place of Adams. Privately, Trimble urged Loyalist paramilitaries to “take the moral high ground” by handing in some weapons first.
Trimble and Paisley called for the election of a constituent assembly tasked with shaping a settlement. Major embraced the idea, and in May 1996 the Northern Ireland Forum was elected. It was a hollow victory for Trimble: 24.2 per cent of the vote and 30 seats out of 110, against 24 for the DUP, 21 for the SDLP and 17 for Sinn Fein. Talks began, but only after Trimble protested at the US Senator George Mitchell chairing them.
Ulster’s extremes polarised again: the IRA bombed the centre of Manchester, and Trimble and Paisley led a second stand-off at Drumcree before another symbolic walk enabled them to claim victory. In the Commons, the former Liberal leader David Steel said Trimble should have set “a higher standard of leadership”.
Trimble first met Blair late in 1996, applauding him for abandoning Labour’s policy of Irish unification “by consent”. After Labour’s landslide victory the following May, the peace process quickened. Two weeks of bilateral talks between Mitchell and the parties brought them close to agreement, and on April 7 1998 Blair flew to Belfast after Trimble rejected Irish proposals for cross-border bodies bypassing the planned Assembly.
Blair persuaded the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, to accept an initially “shadow” assembly while “shadow” north-south bodies were formed. He also reassured Trimble that steps could be taken to prevent Sinn Fein joining the Executive without the IRA having come aboard.
On Good Friday, April 10 1998, the deal was struck, with all parties, including the DUP and Sinn Fein, acquiescing. It provided for the release of prisoners, all-ireland bodies, and a devolved government in which Republicans would eventually serve. Trimble declared: “Despite Gerry Adams’s taunts, we have risen from the table with the Union stronger than when we sat down,” and he set out to sell the Agreement to his party.
Two-thirds of Orange Order delegates rejected it, but the Unionist Council was initially 72 per cent in favour – down to 53 per cent by 2000. At the end of May, 71.1 per cent of Northern Ireland’s voters endorsed the agreement at a referendum. Next, the Assembly was elected, after a campaign in which hardline Loyalists stoned Trimble’s office; it produced a clear majority for the Agreement, but with – worryingly for Trimble – 30 Unionist members for and 28 against. On July 1 1998, Trimble was installed as First Minister.
Within weeks, Adams told Trimble there was no requirement under the agreement for the IRA to begin handing in its weapons before joining the Executive. Trimble was also concerned that while Blair had promised that terrorist prisoners would not be released unless violence ended for good, there were continuing atrocities ascribed to “internal housekeeping”. His view that releases should have been conditional on an end to violence was shared by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw.
Trimble was woken in a Denver hotel room to be told he had won the Nobel Prize; he considered it premature. Accepting it in Oslo that December, he said he had tried to “tell Unionists to give things a chance to develop”. There was a Loyalist backlash in Upper Bann when he and other laureates went on to meet the Pope.
He pressured the IRA by refusing to nominate Sinn Fein ministers to north-south meetings and threatening suspension of the Assembly. They gave ground, and on December 2 1999 the Executive took up its powers, with Martin Mcguinness, a former IRA chief of staff, as minister of education.
The IRA offered to put its arms “beyond use”, but there was still no decommissioning, prompting a challenge to Trimble from the Reverend Martyn Smyth, backed by 43 per cent of the Unionist council. Elections in 2001 brought DUP gains from Trimble’s supporters. He threatened to resign as First Minister if the IRA did not start decommissioning by July 1 – and did so, with Reg Empey taking his place.
That October decommissioning began, forced when President George W Bush refused US visas to some Republicans. And on November 1 2001 – two of his colleagues having embarrassingly failed to vote for his return – Trimble again became First Minister, this time with the SDLP’S Mark Durkan as his deputy. That month, he was named The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year.
This bout of devolution lasted just under a year: on October 14 2002, John Reid, Northern Ireland Secretary, suspended the Executive over the IRA’S misuse of Sinn Fein’s offices. The machinery functioned well, though Trimble aroused criticism by urging a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should become part of the Republic (an attempt to wrong-foot the nationalists), and threatening to resign unless the police – still not under Executive control – tackled IRA street violence.
Trimble played a leading part in efforts to resurrect the Assembly, but at elections in 2003 his party lost further ground to the DUP; Republicans, in his view, preferred to deal with Loyalist hardliners. Then, in the 2005 general election, he lost Upper Bann to the DUP. In defeat he said: “I believe the situation in Northern Ireland is better because of what we have started.”
Left with one MP to the DUP’S nine, Trimble resigned as Unionist leader. He blamed London and Dublin for not upholding the Agreement, saying that Blair had not brought home to Republicans that they must abandon their private army. By contrast, he believed the Unionists had failed because they tried too hard to implement the Agreement. He insisted that Ulster needed a Unionist party whose values were not those of the Free Presbyterian Church, and accused his predecessor, Molyneaux, of having undermined him.
Trimble remained Assembly Member for Upper Bann until 2007, but in 2006 accepted a life peerage. The passing of control of the police to the Executive was now a stumbling block; in his maiden speech he argued that the issue was not the devolution of policing – hardly mentioned in the Agreement – but acceptance of the police.
The St Andrew’s Agreement that October paved the way for the Executive to resume. Before this took place the following May, Trimble told the Lords: “It looks as though [the DUP and Sinn Fein] will finally implement the Belfast Agreement. I suspect that, after the initial shock, people will find that they can work together – and probably better than they expect.”
In 2007 Trimble joined David Cameron’s Conservatives. He looked forward to working with a “resurgent, revitalised party”, but told Unionists it was “essential for Northern Ireland to become involved in the national politics of the United Kingdom”.
Trimble later made a major contribution to the Lords’ debates over Brexit when the Northern Ireland “backstop” – involving Britain’s continued membership of the Single Market for an indeterminate period – became a barrier to acceptance of the agreement Theresa May had negotiated.
David Trimble was twice married. There were no children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce. He married, secondly, Daphne Orr, a solicitor and former pupil, in 1978; they had two daughters and two sons; his son Nicholas is active within the Ulster Unionist Party.