Daphne Trimble: ​David and I celebrated the  Belfast Agreement with fish and chips

David Trimble was an intellectual with an unquenchable passion for history and opera. Their Lisburn home contains an eye-wateringly large collection of opera records and CDs.“A couple of months ago I thought I have to do something with them – David’s not here anymore, so I went through them and I took out all the opera box sets of CDs and I put them in boxes and catalogued and tucked them away out of sight. There are nine boxes of opera box sets.

“David, if he got enthusiastic about something, there was never a little bit of enthusiasm, it was all or nothing, no matter what it was that he was doing.”

Daphne says all four of their children were taken to the opera. “They had to be indoctrinated,” she laughs. "For their 10th birthdays they were taken as a special weekend with their dad to see an opera.”David Trimble has been hailed as a brilliant statesman whose legacy will live on forever thanks to his work on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought to an end the Troubles and re-established the Stormont devolved parliament.

After all the high drama of the peace talks which brought about the accord, how did the Trimble family celebrate? According to Daphne there was no popping of Champagne corks.“We were exhausted. I think we had fish and chips.

“The next day David went to get money out of the hole in the wall and he couldn’t remember his pin number. He was just exhausted. There were no big celebrations, he just slept.”

Together with the late John Hume, the then leader of the SDLP, David Trimble was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 for his work on the Good Friday Agreement.

Up until his death, there had been a popular tendency in the media to celebrate John Hume rather than Trimble in terms of the GFA, but perceptions seem to rebalancing. Indeed, there was Gerry Adams’ recent statement about not appreciating until very recently how difficult it was for Trimble to get enough of unionism over the line for the agreement.

Daphne agrees that those perceptions are starting to rebalance, but adds: “David never said anything about feeling that John was more celebrated than him.”She does, feel, however that David had more to give; rather than being content to have secured a one-off pragmatic solution to a specific (NI) thorny problem.

“He would have liked to contribute more. He did quite a bit of work in Israel, with the Turkel Commission (an inquiry set up by Israeli government to investigate the Gaza flotilla raid, and the Blockade of Gaza) and I think he was quite highly regarded there.“When he went to the Lords and joined the Conservative Party that was almost on the understanding that he would get a job in government, but it didn’t happen because that election was the one that left us with a coalition government.

“He did feel that his talents weren’t used by the Conservative Party in a way that he would have liked because he did spend a lot of time going round Conservative constituency associations and speaking to them. I think he felt that he had more to give.”

Given the crucial US involvement in the peace talks, David Trimble travelled often to the States, sometimes accompanied by Daphne.“I went to quite a few of the St Patrick’s Day shindigs. They were useful, because I remember there being times when Adams and David would be cloistered with Bill Clinton in the upstairs bit of the White House.“The reason that David really insisted on going to them was because there was so much had already happened with the Irish American fraternity that unionists were slightly left out.“There was a big Irish American gala dinner, and when David started going it it would have been full of tricolours and very much Irishness and no Britishness.

“He didn’t need to make a big point, but he said there needs to be even-handedness and it wasn’t a difficult argument to make. The people were very receptive to it, so there did become a much better even-handedness in the American approach.”During the peace negotiations and immediately afterwards, did David ever express concern that Sinn Fein in government at Stormont might work to destabilise Northern Ireland rather than move the country forward as everyone hoped?

“David did the deal with the SDLP and when he was first minister it was Seamus Mallon and Mark Durkan – it was people that he could work with. It was when the electorate decided to punish the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP that we got Sinn Fein and the DUP. I honestly doubt if David saw that coming. I don’t think any of us saw that coming.

“We had the Chuckle Brothers and that was taking us to somewhere that I think in 1998 we hadn’t anticipated that we would be. But that’s democracy. Democracy is the least worst system of government.”

When IRA decommissioning took place in 2005, was David convinced that the vast majority of the available weaponry had been permanently put beyond use?“I think he was probably convinced that they weren’t going to be used again. I don’t know about being convinced that they had been put beyond use.

“I remember him describing a conversation with Martin McGuinness in which McGuinness said ‘we have to banjax the weapons, we know that’. So I think he did accept that they wouldn’t be used again, but the decommissioning was messy and that was part of the reason why things became difficult for David.

“It could have been done better if Adams and McGuinness had really decided to do what they ought to have done in a more transparent way, but all the cloak and dagger stuff and no cameras, how could you know precisely what was done.

"The honest brokers who oversaw it, I think they were used to some extent. I know that a lot of the guns were decommissioned but as far as I’m aware they haven’t been used particularly since.”David and Daphne Trimble did their upmost to maintain a normal family life for their four children during the intense negotiations in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement. At the time their youngest, Sarah, was just six years of age.

But there were, according to Daphne, death threats and “extremely difficult” times. “We had the DUP outside the door ranting and raving. There were several times when they protested outside the house.“One time we were told there was going to be a protest on a Saturday morning. Back then Sarah was doing swimming lessons, and you had to sign up for the lessons on a Saturday morning … I would have been the worst in the world if she hadn’t got to her swimming lessons.

“David wasn’t around so I said they (the DUP protestors) won’t be coming that early to protest, and I went down to sign Sarah up for her swimming lessons.“When I drove back I saw somebody in the lay-by wrapped in a Union Jack and I thought ‘oh good, I’ll get back before them’, so I got into the house and Richard said ‘what are you worrying about mother, they’ve been and gone?’.”

Daphne said that when Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster defected to the DUP (in Dec 2003), that sense of betrayal did stay with David.“Arlene has acknowledged that the constitutional arrangements that we came to were right and she has said publicly that it was the prisoner releases, because of what happened to her father, it was those that she couldn’t stomach. I can understand that and I can make my peace with Arlene. But Jeffrey is different ...”

One of the most memorable images captured of Trimble during his political career was taken during a 1998 concert at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. The gig was in support of the Yes vote for the referendum held in conjunction with the Good Friday Agreement, with bands Ash and U2 both performing.

The iconic moment of the night saw U2 frontman Bono hold aloft the hands of both Trimble and Hume.“Bono improvised with David and John Hume on stage – they would never had done that,” laughs Daphne, remembering they could only get two tickets for the event.“At the time I don’t think we realised what impact it would have. It was so impactful.”

Not even a year on from his death, and currently immersed in all the Good Friday Agreement anniversary celebrations, Daphne Trimble admits she “misses everything” about her husband.“The last few months were difficult because he wasn’t well. His mind was going. But to have him back the way he was would be brilliant.”