Keir Starmer, leader of Britain\u2019s opposition Labour Party, called Trimble \u201ca towering figure of Northern Ireland and British politics\u201d in a tweet Monday.<\/p>\n
The UUP was Northern Ireland\u2019s largest Protestant unionist party when, led by Trimble, it agreed to the Good Friday peace accord.<\/p>\n
He was the party\u2019s first leader in 30 years to meet with the Irish premier in Dublin. In 1997, Trimble became the first unionist leader to negotiate with Irish republican party Sinn Fein.<\/p>\n
Trimble shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with Catholic moderate leader John Hume, head of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, for their work.<\/p>\n
He became first minister in Northern Ireland\u2019s first power-sharing government the same year, with the SDLP\u2019s Seamus Mallon as deputy first minister.<\/p>\n
But both the UUP and the SDLP soon saw themselves eclipsed by more hardline parties — the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein.<\/p>\n
Trimble struggled to keep his party together as the power-sharing government was rocked by disagreements over disarming the IRA and other paramilitary groups. Senior colleagues defected to the DUP, Trimble lost his seat in Britain\u2019s Parliament in 2005 and soon after he resigned as party leader. The following year he was appointed to the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland power-sharing has gone through many crises since then \u2014 but the peace settlement has largely endured.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Good Friday Agreement is something which everybody in Northern Ireland has been able to agree with,\u201d Trimble said earlier this year. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean they agree with everything. There are aspects which some people thought were a mistake, but the basic thing is that this was agreed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trimble is survived by his wife Daphne and children, Richard, Victoria, Nicholas and Sarah.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] David Trimble, a former Northern Ireland first minister who won the Nobel Peace Prize for playing a key role in helping end Northern Ireland\u2019s decades of violence, has died, the Ulster Unionist Party said Monday. He was 77. The party said in a statement on behalf of the Trimble family that the unionist politician …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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