“It is with great sadness that the family of Lord Trimble announces that he passed away earlier today following a short illness,” the Ulster Unionist Party said in a statement on behalf of his family. .
This Protestant jurist who entered politics in the early 1970s in the ranks of the unionist Vanguard party, close to the paramilitaries, helped shape, a quarter of a century later, the Good Friday Peace Agreement with the late Catholic John Hume, Nobel co-winner.
“Deeply saddened by the death of David Trimble, someone who played a crucial and courageous role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland,” Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin tweeted.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the “bravery” of this “giant of British and international politics”.
“He will long be remembered for his intelligence, personal bravery and fierce determination to change politics for the better,” he tweeted.
– “Courage and vision” –
Trimble led the first power-sharing government to emerge from the Good Friday Agreement, which settled three decades of bloody clashes between Republicans, mostly Catholics and supporters of Irish reunification, and Unionists, mostly Protestants and supporters of maintaining the province in the British Crown.
“David Trimble was a man of courage and vision. He chose to seize the opportunity for peace when it presented itself and sought to end the decades of violence that plagued his beloved Northern Ireland,” reacted the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Doug Beattie.
After rubbing shoulders with the extremists of Vanguard, David Trimble joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UPP) in 1978 and took over as its leader in 1995, five years after his first term as a member of the British Parliament in London.
In the fall of 1997, after the ceasefire of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), he was the first Unionist official to initiate dialogue with the Republicans of Sinn Fein, the political branch of the IRA.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 with former Catholic leader John Hume, who died in August 2020, in recognition of “their efforts to find a peaceful solution” to the Troubles which killed more than 3,500 people.
Sinn Fein Vice-President Michelle O’Neill said that “his very important contribution to the peace process and his courage to help bring about the Good Friday Agreement leaves a legacy a quarter of a century later of which he and his family can be proud”.
– Northern Irish Protocol –
Trimble’s death comes amid political impasse in Northern Ireland, at the heart of tensions between the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) over the post-Brexit deal supposed to govern their relationship.
The Northern Irish protocol plans to protect the single European market without causing the return of a physical demarcation between the British province and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU, to avoid weakening the peace signed in 1998.
But the Unionists, denouncing the creation of a border in the Irish Sea within the United Kingdom, are firmly opposed to it. They have been blocking the institutions of the province since May by refusing to join the local executive with the Republicans of Sinn Fein as long as the checks are not abandoned.
To unblock the situation, the British government has presented a bill to override some of the obligations provided for in the agreement, a move deemed illegal by the EU which raises the threat of trade retaliation.
Brexit proponent Trimble last year attacked the Northern Ireland Protocol, challenging the legality of the deal.