“I have known David Trimble for most of my adult life. When I enrolled as a student in the law faculty at Queen’s University, David was one of my lecturers. You did not have to sit for very long in a David Trimble lecture or tutorial to recognise that you were in the presence of a supreme academic and someone of giant intellectual proportions. David manfully did his best to teach me two of the driest subjects in the legal curriculum: land law and equity. His lack of success in attaining enthusiasm on my part for those subjects was a failure not on his part but on mine.
“However, there was a fellow student in respect of whom David subsequently engendered great enthusiasm in a different and far more lasting sphere. Of course, my fellow student Miss Daphne Orr went on to become Mrs Daphne Trimble. What a rock Daphne has been for David through the years. It was clear to all that, during his most turbulent political years, Daphne was indeed that rock. Of course, in more recent times of failing health, she was a tower of strength to him. And so our thoughts today, first and foremost, are with Lady Daphne and their four children and wider family. It does not matter how big a name one might have or how huge a household name someone might be; it is in the bosom of their family that they are loved and missed the most, and so it will be in the Trimble household.
“Of course, David Trimble’s name is synonymous with the Belfast Agreement, and there I come to the territory where I disagreed with David Trimble. To me and some other unionists, the Belfast Agreement was built on a mass injustice of the release of hundreds of terrorists of all shades onto our streets, as a precursor to terrorists in government. That was all part of a structure that has proved to be failing and dysfunctional ever since.
“One of the reasons why it is failing and dysfunctional is that, although to David, perhaps, and, certainly, to the unionists who voted for it, the Belfast Agreement was meant to be a settlement, it was to republicans and nationalists only ever a process, in which the insatiable had to be fed ever-constant concessions, thus creating the very instability from which it continues to suffer.
“Although I disagreed fundamentally with David about the Belfast Agreement, I have to say this: David Trimble was more honest politically in his espousal, promotion and operation of the Belfast Agreement than those who supplanted him as the leaders of unionism, supplanting him by vilification of his agreement and of the man to an extent that was often vicious and unnecessary. Having so vilified and destroyed, the very same people and party then donned the political clothes of David Trimble to operate to the full the very same agreement that they had vilified throughout those years. That is why I say that David Trimble was more honest in his espousal of the Belfast Agreement than those — or some of those — who vilified him.
“That political dishonesty was compounded by the pretence that, at St Andrews, radical change was made to the Belfast Agreement. The only radical change was a change for the worse, whereby the First Minister now comes not from the biggest designation in the House but from the biggest party. That move of short-termism and self-serving interest, primarily by the DUP, causes us now, even though unionism is still the biggest designation in the House, to look at the prospect of a Sinn Féin First Minister and the lead party of the biggest designation, the DUP, acting as their hapless bridesmaid. Yes, I disagreed with David Trimble very much about the Belfast Agreement, but I recognise that he was the more honest one when it came to the espousal and promotion of that agreement.
“I am happy that, in latter times, I found common cause with Lord Trimble in opposing the protocol. He was, of course, a joint applicant in the ongoing judicial review challenge to that protocol. I am very grateful — as unionism should be — for the intellectual dissection that David applied to the protocol, identifying and seeing that it presented peril not only to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland but to the very institutions that he sought to create. The clear message is that a choice will come for adherents to the protocol: do they want to cling to the protocol, or do they want to cling to the agreement that David Trimble formed? Frankly, I do not believe that you can have both. I think that David Trimble saw that, when he said that the protocol was ripping the heart out of the agreement.
“I will finish where I started by expressing again our heartfelt sympathy for Lady Daphne and the Trimble children. Mr Speaker, if I might, by an uncanny coincidence, another lecturer of mine in the law faculty died on the same day. I refer to Gillian Kerr, the widow of the late Lord Brian Kerr, our former Lord Chief Justice, who served in the Supreme Court. By uncanny coincidence, Gillian Kerr also died on 25 July. I express sympathy and condolences to the sons of Lord and Lady Kerr, who, in a very short time, have lost both father and mother. They too made a mark of particular significance on the history of the Province.”