THERE IS A  story told about the hours leading to the Good Friday Agreement at Easter 1998; about Sinn Féin approaching the loyalist David Ervine.

It was late in the talks – decision time was approaching.

The republican plan was for the two sides to jointly push for the prisoner release period to be reduced from two years to one.

It was Gerry Kelly who spoke with Ervine:

“I told him I would pass on what he he said to me,” Ervine would later tell me – “but my sense was it was as good as it got. Of course, I was met with a crescendo of similar opinions when I discussed it with the PUP (Progressive Unionist Party) and the UVF in the conference room, and I was able to go back and say to him, actually it was Adams I bumped into, and said, you’re not on, this is as far as it goes…I gave Kelly my personal answer, but then I gave Adams the definitive answer – the collective answer was no, this is as good as it gets, and, as I say from my own personal perspective, as good as it needed to be.”

In 1998/99 David Trimble carried the heavy weight of the Good Friday Agreement. He did so with the support of the then loyalist leadership, including David Ervine, Gusty Spence, William Smith, Gary McMichael and David Adams. History will remember the courage of his decision then.

— Brian Rowan (@BrianPJRowan) July 25, 2022

As I tweeted last night following the news of his death, Trimble “carried the heavy weight of the Good Friday Agreement”.

One of those heavy weights was this issue of prisoner releases.

Of course, loyalists would have wanted that to be completed within a year, but Ervine understood the implications of that – perhaps better than republicans did.

That any such move could have pushed Trimble over the edge – and broken the agreement.

This was the importance of the loyalist presence within those talks. That not only did they help Trimble and his Ulster Unionist Party carry the day and, then, the referendum.

But also that explanation to Kelly and Adams of how finely balanced things were – that there is a time in negotiations and in peace-building when you stop pushing in order to protect the wider agreement.

“I don’t think we could have sustained a peace process, I really don’t,” Ervine would later tell me.

Trimble was fighting battles inside his party. The DUP was outside the tent. He needed the loyalists.

I said on television last night that I was a non-believer in 1998 – that I thought the Agreement would ask too much of all the sides.

We did not understand ‘process’ then – this idea that you get an agreement down on paper and you then spend long years arguing about its implementation.

Trimble and John Hume were jointly awarded the <chrome_find class=”find_in_page find_selected”>Nobel Peace Prize.

In a world context, this was the significance of our story then; an acknowledgement of Trimble’s leadership and courage alongside Hume and Adams and others in that moment of history and hope.

We had the agreement on paper and, then, more than a year later another negotiation, again chaired by Senator George Mitchell.

The issue of arms decommissioning had dominated much of the debate from April 1998 through to this review of its implementation which began in September the following year.

Trimble’s position was encapsulated within the words – ‘no guns-no government’.

The IRA would have to move first before an Executive, including Sinn Fein, could be formed.

Then Trimble was asked to take another big step – to enter government without a start to decommissioning.

There had been a shift in emphasis from ‘no guns-no government’ to ‘no government-no guns’.

Trimble took that step. Was prepared to wait a short period for an IRA response, and was made to wait much longer than that.

The first Stormont Executive lasted only a mater of months.

Republicans stretched the elastic of decommissioning to breaking point – in a wordplay that began with ‘not a bullet, not an ounce’, to an argument about ‘silent’ guns, then allowing arms inspections, before, eventually agreeing a method to ‘put arms beyond use’.

The first act of IRA decommissioning was delayed until October 2001, well outside the envisaged timeframe of the Good Friday Agreement.

We had stop-start politics, until Trimble’s patience finally snapped two years later.

In 2003, the IRA decommissioned more weapons, but Trimble stepped outside a choreographed political sequence intended to restore the Stormont Executive because of a lack of detail on what had happened.

He needed information on the number of weapons decommissioned – how much Semtex explosives?

Needed that information to persuade an ever-more sceptical unionist audience that the IRA was indeed dismantling its war capability.

That detail was not available. Decommissioning was a secret process.

This is when things moved beyond Trimble.

The DUP would emerge as the largest unionist party that year and, in 2005, Trimble would lose his Westminster seat.

He resigned as Ulster Unionist leader. His party has never recovered. Think about the number of leaders it has had since – Empey, Elliott, Nesbitt, Swann, Aiken and, now, Beattie.

But Trimble will be remembered, with others in his negotiating team in that period of the late 1990s, as leaders in the peace.

They gave this place a chance. Helped make it better.

Yes, it was and is a flawed peace, but it has helped us escape those years of war.

Trimble has that moment and that place in history.

Last night, Gerry Adams said: “David’s contribution to the Good Friday Agreement and to the quarter century of relative peace that followed cannot be underestimated.”

I know from personal experience that Trimble could be difficult, argumentative – awkward.

But we better appreciate and understand now, that part of this was the pressure of those times.

He could have taken the easier step of walking away, as others did in 1998, but he chose a different path – a road to a better place.

And this is how he will be remembered.