Good Friday Agreement: Tony Blair says he was determined to bring peace to Northern Ireland when he came to power in 1997

Addressing a major conference in Belfast alongside former US President Bill Clinton and ex-taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Mr Blair said he had grown up with the Troubles.

He said: “I was determined for all sorts of reasons to try to do things.”

He added: “We were coming up to the end of the century, a new millennium, a new generation taking charge in various places. Obviously we were huge fans of what President Clinton was doing in the US, everything kind of aligned.

“Also we were new in government and hadn’t had time to become cynical. We just thought let’s give this a go.”

“I remember discussing it with my deputy John Prescott and he said ‘I don’t know why you are doing this, they absolutely hate each other over there’. But I said ‘no, we’re going to give it a go’, and we did. There always is this moment in time when things seem to come together and I thought at least it was worth giving a best shot.”

Mr Blair recalled his first meeting with US President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, when Mr Blair was leader of the opposition in the UK.

He said a member of the press asked Mr Clinton at that meeting if he thought he was sitting beside the next UK prime minister, noting the potential diplomatic difficulties for the president in terms of upsetting his relationship with then prime minsiter John Major if he had said yes.

“He said, I just hope he is sitting alongside the next president of the United States,” Mr Blair said.

“So I always thought, ‘yeah, that guy could do prime minister questions’.”

Mr Blair recalled his first meeting with then Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

“At the time this was very shocking to people, and you had to be prepared to do it, and I remember after I did it, after I met them for the first time I then went to a shopping centre for a visit, when I got to the shopping centre I was saying hello to people and so on, and suddenly this huge wave of people, including people who were wearing washing up gloves – those plastic washing up gloves, the last time I had ever seen anyone wear these was my mum, and I thought ‘what’s going on here, what sort of protest is this’,” he said.

“It was all to do with the fact I shouldn’t have been shaking hands with Gerry Adams because this was a big thing, there was a huge debate – yes you can meet him but you can’t shake hands with him, I said ‘we’re going to meet him and we’re going to shake hands, let’s just do what you would do, one human being to another … we know we disagree about the past but lets see if we can agree about the future’.

“Mo Mowlam then went and visited the loyalist prisoners in the Maze. All of these things were difficult, I don’t think anything could have happened unless we were prepared to sit down and to talk to people, and to understand these conflicts come about because there are two distinct narratives in opposition to each other, and the only way you will ever make peace is if one side understands how the other side feel. They don’t have to agree with it, they don’t even have to sympathise with it, but at least they have to understand it.”