The Wit and Wisdom of... David Trimble

But the realisation of peace needs more than magnanimity. It requires a certain political prudence, and a willingness at times not to be too precise or pedantic. Burke says, "It is the nature of greatness not to be exact." Amos Oz agrees, "Inconsistency is the basis of coexistence. The heroes of tragedy, driven by consistency and by righteousness, destroy each other. He who seeks total supreme justice seeks death." Again the warning not to aim for abstract perfection. Heaven knows, in Ulster, what I have looked for is a peace within the realms of the possible. We could only have started from where we actually were, not from where we would have liked to be.

And we have started. And we will go on. And we will go on all the better if we walk, rather than run. If we put aside fantasy and accept the flawed nature of human enterprises. Sometimes we will stumble, maybe even go back a bit. But this need not matter if in the spirit of an old Irish proverb we say to ourselves "Tomorrow is another day."

... Now, winter is here, and there is still no sign of spring. Like John Bunyan's Pilgrim, we politicians have been through the Slough of Despond. We have seen Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair. I can certainly recall passing many times through the Valley of Humiliation. And all too often we have encountered, not only on the other side, but on our own side too "the man who could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand".

Nevertheless, like one of Beckett's characters "I will go on, because I must go on." What we democratic politicians want in Northern Ireland is not some utopian society but a normal society. The best way to secure that normalcy is the tried and trusted method of parliamentary democracy. So the Northern Ireland Assembly is the primary institutional instrument for the development of a normal society in Northern Ireland. Like any parliament it needs to be more than a cockpit for competing victimisations. Burke said it best: "Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and an advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, nor local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good resulting from the general reason of the whole."

David Trimble, former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. This is taken from his speech after receiving the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, for their work on the Good Friday Agreement.