By Amanda Ferguson
BELFAST (Reuters) – The prime ministers of Britain and Ireland paid respects to Nobel Peace laureate David Trimble at his funeral near Belfast on Monday as allies honoured his role in steering Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority to a 1998 peace deal.
Trimble, who became the first to hold the office of Northern Irish First Minister under the power-sharing deal, which largely ended three decades of bloodshed in the region, died on July 25 at the age of 77 following a short illness.
Trimble and Irish nationalist John Hume jointly received the Nobel prize in 1998 for their roles in helping end the violence between Catholic nationalists seeking Irish unity and pro-British Protestants wishing to stay in the United Kingdom that claimed some 3,600 lives.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Irish counterpart Micheal Martin attended the low-key service at Trimble’s local Presbyterian Church in Lisburn, just outside Belfast, but no politicians addressed the mourners.
“The Northern Ireland peace process could not have happened without him. That is just a simple statement of fact,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the BBC ahead of the service.
Politicians from across Northern Ireland’s political spectrum attended, including the heads of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party and of the rival Democratic Unionist Party, which has held the position of First Minister since 2007.
Gerry Adams, former leader of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, was one of several senior Irish nationalists to attend.
“The array of those who have gathered today to pay their respects bears witness … to the legacy he left all of us,” Charles McMullen, former Moderator Presbyterian Church in Ireland told the mourners.
Trimble’s biographer Dean Godson told the service he was the “the most prestigious and substantial figure thrown up by unionism since the foundation of Northern Ireland in 1921.”
“In death he is finally being accorded the respect and love from all polities and communities in these islands… which he did not always receive in life,” he added, a reference to the antagonism Trimble triggered in both Irish nationalists and hard-line unionists during his career.
(Writing by Amanda Ferguson and Conor Humphries; Editing by Toby Chopra)
