Former Northern Ireland Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate David Trimble has died
David Trimble at the Nobel Peace Prize Summit in Barcelona, November 2015. AP - Manu Fernandez
Text by: RFI Follow
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David Trimble died on Monday at the age of 77.
He had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for having worked for reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics in the British province.
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"
It is with great sadness that the family of Lord Trimble announces that he passed away earlier today after a short illness
," the Ulster Unionist Party said in a statement.
Entering politics in the early 1970s in the ranks of the unionist Vanguard party, close to the paramilitaries, this Protestant jurist helped shape, a quarter of a century later, the Good Friday Peace Agreement with the Catholic John Hume, co-winner of the Nobel.
David Trimble led the first power-sharing government resulting from this agreement which ended three decades of bloody clashes between Republicans, mainly Catholics and supporters of the reunification of Ireland, and Unionists, mainly Protestants and defenders of the maintenance of 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
,” responded Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug beatie.
“
Very sad news.
David Trimble was a prominent figure in Northern Irish and British politics
,” reacted British Opposition Leader Keir Starmer.
Prime Minister Michael Martin said he was "
deeply saddened
" by the death of the man whose "
crucial and courageous role in the establishment of peace in Northern Ireland
" he hailed.
William David Trimble was born on October 15, 1944 to a middle-class family in Bangor, in the eastern part of the British province of Northern Ireland.
With a studious temperament, he obtained a law degree in 1968 at Queen's University in Belfast, where he later taught.
After rubbing shoulders with the extremists of Vanguard, David Trimble joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UPP) in 1978, of which he took the helm 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.
Once the peace agreement was signed, after months of intense discussions, he spared no effort to convince the Unionists who were crying treason to accept the historic compromise.
Three years after marching hand in hand with fundamentalist Ian Paisley during an Orange march, David Trimble shakes hands with Irish singer Bono (U2) and John Hume during a peace concert in Belfast that will help to the victory of the "yes" vote in the referendum on the Good Friday agreement.
A supporter of Brexit, he attacked the Northern Irish protocol last year, challenging the legality of the agreement supposed to govern relations between the British province and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the European Union.
(
With
AFP)
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