The Work of Giants Crumbles
David Trimble leaves a tremendous legacy, but politics passed him by.
Barely a month ago, Northern Ireland’s former first minister David Trimble and his old partner in peace, the Republic of Ireland’s Bertie Ahern, were sitting together in Belfast reminiscing about what they had built. With John Hume’s death in 2020, Trimble and Ahern were among the last of the island’s old giants. And now Trimble has gone too.
Trimble, the joint architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Hume for their efforts, died of cancer yesterday aged 77. With his passing, he leaves the inescapable sense of time escaping our grip, of an age
