Mr. Mark Durkan:

I thank the Senator for his welcome and the question. It is a salient one. I am not sure what exactly made David Trimble decide, in the sense that most talks participants spent their casual conversational time asking each other how we read David Trimble and did we think he was going to be up for an agreement or not. That was because sometimes in the talks he would disappear. He would leave on a Monday and disappear to Westminster for a few days. We would be negotiating with the Ulster Unionist Party team and we found each time the line-up changed the line changed. That made it difficult and it would change again whenever David Trimble came back, so there were big doubts. Officials and people in all the different parties would have been talking and asking that question. John Hume had a glass-half-full approach in that he felt the fact David Trimble had split from other unionist parties to allow George Mitchell into the chair at the start of the talks, the fact he had agreed renegotiated ground rules in circumstances where other unionist parties were opposing them and more saliently the fact that he pivoted on a nuance to stay inside the talks when Sinn Féin was admitted in the summer and autumn of 1997. John read into that that if David Trimble really wanted an excuse to abscond from the talks and possible agreement he would have used any of those opportunities to do so. A point I recall from that time was David Trimble, in a meeting with John Hume, believed himself to be assured the SDLP's negotiating position and our likely proposals were not going to be altered by the fact of Sinn Féin being at the table as well and I think he sought similar assurances from the Irish Government. In that sense, David Trimble kind of pre-assured himself he was not going to be facing a pan-nationalist front. That makes one of the remarks by Baron Dean Godson, who gave a eulogy for David Trimble at his funeral, wrong when he talked about David Trimble having confounded a pan-nationalist front. He certainly seemed to try to assure himself that was not what he was facing.

When it came to the substance of negotiations, everybody knows David Trimble had serious issues in the last week with what was in the strand 2 text. That was called the "Mitchell text" but George Mitchell was making it clear to everybody that it was not his text and he had not drawn it up. He was a wee bit critical of the two Governments for the fact there were no square brackets and no italics in the text.

With strand 1, where we had been negotiating and talking in circles for many months, it was only very late in the negotiations that David Trimble accepted the idea that there could be ministers in the North and it was later still that he accepted the idea that those ministers could sit collectively in an executive. To my mind, the point on which that really turned was whenever we shared with him the idea of the joint office of fiirst ministers. I had a list of roles and responsibilities or functions that the joint First Ministers might do. That was because at that stage, only two weeks out from the agreement, the Ulster Unionist position was still to be opposed to an executive. Even if people with executive authority in the North were possibly going to be called ministers, they did not want them in an executive. We were saying that someone would have to manage issues between Departments and manage and co-ordinate budget oversight etc. We had a list of roles and functions and David Trimble looked at Seamus Mallon and me and said that this was all written in the language of functions and roles, I would prefer to see it written in the language of power. When we asked him what he meant by the language of power, the only example he gave was patronage. I can remember Seamus and I taking that and going back to John with it, saying that we saw definitely that the Ulster Unionist position had moved with all of the issues that it was refusing to contemplate in strand 1. Obviously that did not conclude the negotiations because different things were factored in there. One of the reasons David Trimble and the UUP had argued against ministers, and particularly our proposals that ministers would be appointed by d'Hondt, was they said that if they have personal executive authority, they go off and do their own thing. We heard a lot of talk about rogue ministers, solo runs and all that sort of stuff. It is precisely because of those sorts of concerns coming up on the unionist side that some of the checks and balances are actually in the agreement. Things like the petition of concern and all the rest were there as much to protect unionists against this bogey fear they had about rogue ministers, solo runs and all the rest of it. The balance of checks and inclusive arrangements became enough for David Trimble to decide that institutionally he could go with things in strand 1. Obviously, that, in turn, was only finally negotiated after the issues in strand 2 had been sorted. There were a couple of days of serious sweating with the Ulster Unionists and Alliance demanding significant change in the strand 2 text and the Irish Government having to water down the language and whittle down the list there. That obviously worried us in the SDLP and I know it worried Sinn Féin because, particularly, it looked as though at that stage the Ulster Unionists were trying to negotiate that strand 1 would happen and then when we got the assembly that we would then negotiate the details of strand 2. There were tensions and difficulties there and things that had to be finely balanced.