The sons of the Nobel peace prize winners David Trimble and John Hume have said their fathers would have found a way of solving the political deadlock that has seen power sharing in Northern Ireland suspended, 25 years after the peace deal their parents sealed.
As ceremonies took place in Belfast and Dublin to mark the anniversary of the 1998 Belfast agreement, Nicholas Trimble and John Hume Jr both said their fathers would have lamented the absence of government for more than a year.
“I think he would try and think of a better way,” Trimble said. “There is always a way through difficulties and the solution that dad would come up with would never be the obvious brute-force tactic, he would try and think his way out of a problem first, and I think that’s maybe a trick that’s being missed here.”
Hume said he thought his father would be frustrated to see the current political deadlock at Stormont.
“He’d be very frustrated, just like he was over the years with the deadlock that we had for decades in the north, and I think he would be doing his damnedest to bring the two sides together, to concentrate on everything that is in our common interest and using that common ground to build out to find a way forward,” he said.
Hume and Trimble were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize for their efforts in the creation of the deal 25 years ago, and died in 2020 and 2022 respectively.
The names of the nearly 3,600 people who died as a result of conflict in Northern Ireland between 1966 and 2019 were read out loud as part of a ceremony in Dublin, while at a Stormont event the former US senator George Mitchell wished the country enduring “peace and prosperity”.
The first speaker of the Stormont assembly, John Alderdice, hailed the “extraordinary” feat of 1998 where the people of Northern Ireland tried to make sure the “disturbed historic relations between our communities” were the focus of politics, not the institutions.
The current Stormont speaker, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey, described the Good Friday agreement as a “new beginning”.
The former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said that “despite current challenges the future is bright”.
“If you doubt that, think of the countless lives that have been saved or reflect on events in other parts of the world at this time.”
Adams said there was a lot to be thankful for and still a lot to be done. He said the agreement was for everyone and it was “here to stay”.
“The last 25 years have been up and down, and there have been many twists and turns, but one thing is for certain, we are all in a better place.”
