Ms Liz O'Donnell:

Certainly. David Trimble was a difficult person. He was a very complex person and quite shy and, as a result, aggressive. He could be very aggressive when people met him in person. However, we knew he was under huge pressure and he was willing to embrace negotiations in the first place. As members know, the DUP was not willing to embrace negotiations or come into talks at all. He was a very brave person in the end because, as I said, there was a nationalist consensus in that Fianna Fáil, the Progressive Democrats and the entire Oireachtas was behind the SDLP.

There was such a groundswell of support for going into the negotiations with a positive attitude that David Trimble felt he had to do that, but he felt he was negotiating down. I suppose that is true of any person leading a party that had been in the ascendant and was still in a majority position. Thus, the UUP felt it was negotiating down and every concession it made, and even agreeing to a substantive agenda, was a nightmare for David Trimble because if you agree to a discussion on North-South bodies some of his people would walk out, or threaten to, and he would be hammered outside by the DUP in media interviews. As he was on his own and his party was not united he was under ferocious pressure, which you could literally see in his face every day. He was under terrible pressure, but in the end he did it. He took the leap and trusted in the bona fides of the people who agreed to the Good Friday Agreement on that day. He trusted there would be decommissioning of weapons and that he was not being sold a pup by the two Governments. Ultimately, he risked his own political career, to be frank, and his party.

History will be kinder to David Trimble and his party than politics has been because in the end the extremists in the DUP, who were rejectionists for many years, destroying the UUP politically at one stage, took the golden prize of having the top job and being in government. It is the way politics works. The SDLP similarly took a hiding in elections from Sinn Féin. In some ways, the people who made the sacrifices lost out politically, which was a shame, but history will be fair to everybody in the end.