Father Alex Reid, a Tipperary-born Redemptorist priest who has spent the past 30 years in west Belfast, is one of the unsung heroes of the Northern peace process. He started his peacemaking career as a mediator between clashing republican paramilitary groups in the 1970s. As long ago as 1986 he was talking to Charles Haughey about his [Reid's] aim of helping Sinn Fein gain control over the republican movement and building a nationalist alliance to work for peace.
In 1987 he arranged the first series of talks between Gerry Adams and John Hume. In March 1988 his face flashed around the world as the priest trying to give the "kiss of life" to a British army corporal beaten and killed after he strayed into the middle of an IRA man's funeral in Belfast.
In the early 1990s he carried copies of what was to become known as the Hume-Adams document between Belfast, Derry and Dublin. From 1992 he was the key intermediary between Albert Reynolds and Gerry Adams, and was centrally involved right up to the August 1994 IRA ceasefire.