David Trimble: Northern Ireland’s Nobel peacemaker

David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s former first minister who died Monday aged 77, lit the way to a landmark peace deal in the troubled province with an example of compromise in an age of bitter divides.

Head of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) which favoured bonds between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, Trimble brought his cohort to the table in long-fraught peace talks.

Despite firebrand convictions, his accommodation of Catholic republicans made him a midwife of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended “The Troubles”.

Trimble shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with republican counterpart John Hume for the accord which ended 30 years of conflict that killed 3,500, and is still hailed as a shining example of statecraft.

He was “a performer on the slack high wire, stunning his audience with an ability to sway back and forth between extreme protestant sectarianism and the moderate centre,” according to biographer Andrew Roth.

The UUP said Monday he had died “following a short illness”.

– Flexible convictions –

William David Trimble was born into a lower middle-class family Bangor, Northern Ireland on October 15, 1944.

A shy and bookish character in school, he won a place at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating with a first class degree in law in 1968 before being called to the bar a year later.

He entered politics in 1975 representing South Belfast in the regional government for the hardline Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, which had loyalist paramilitary links.

When the party split over a potential coalition with republican rivals, Trimble sided with those backing the deal.

It was an early sign his unionist convictions were tempered with notions of pragmatic compromise.

“Flinty David Trimble shows no outward sign of the flexibility needed for this act,” wrote Roth in 2001.

“Uptight, irascible and tetchy, he is known for his bad temper.”

– An Ulster unionist –

Trimble joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in 1978.

In 1990 he was among the crowd who heckled visiting Irish prime minister Charles Haughey from the roof of his party’s Belfast headquarters.

He was elected to British parliament for the UUP that year and became party leader in 1995.

“Trimble was seen by nationalists as… a unionist with the typical Not An Inch mentality,” wrote journalist John Mullin.

Despite the baggage of antagonism, Trimble was the first unionist leader to enter negotiations with republican party Sinn Fein, the political wing of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA).

He led the UUP into eight-month talks resulting in the Good Friday Agreement, which established a power-sharing regional government and wound down military and paramilitary operations on all sides.

In the run-up to a referendum on the accord, he lent his unionist credibility to the campaign — appearing on stage with Hume at a U2 concert which was widely seen as the moment a “yes” vote became a certainty.

His advocacy for peace did not stem a personal dislike for nationalists.

Trimble is said to have called Sinn Fein leader and alleged IRA member Gerry Adams “the most appalling human being I have ever met”.

But his overtures to peace earned him enemies among fellow unionists who believe he betrayed their cause.

Nonetheless, Trimble became Northern Ireland’s first minister at the new devolved Belfast government and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Hume in 1998.

“Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics,” he said in his conciliatory Nobel lecture.

“And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”

– Post-peace –

Trimble’s term as first minister was not to be a smooth affair.

The executive and assembly repeatedly faltered with feuds over the IRA’s pledge to decommission its weapons, a process completed in 2005.

He left office in 2002 as the government began a five-year suspension over an alleged IRA spy ring operating in parliament.

In 2005 Trimble was ousted from his UK parliamentary seat, but was granted a peerage in the upper House of Lords, where he switched allegiance to the Conservative Party in 2006.

In 2019 he admitted in the chamber he had been forced to reform his views on same-sex marriage after his eldest daughter married her girlfriend.

It was one more time the elder statesman proved capable of tempering his views to meet the changing tide of history.