A brief biography of Rev Harold Good and Fr Alec Reid, the men appointed to witness the IRA's decommissioning.
Rev Harold Good
Friends of the Rev Harold Good, former president of the Methodist church, describe him as a "straight man, no soft touch" who is around too long to be anybody's patsy.
He has ministered in tough, sectarian interface areas throughout The Troubles. In 1970, he was honoured with an MBE and in 1985 with an OBE for services to the community. In 2001, he was elected president of the Methodist Church in Ireland.
Now 68, he was born in Derry and educated at the Methodist College in Belfast. His higher education was at Edgehill Theological College in Belfast and the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, USA.
He served as a minister for a time in the US and in the Republic before returning to the North in the late 1960s. His first area to minister was the loyalist Shankill in Belfast. At the time, he became deeply involved in community ministry and development and reconciliation work.
He knows paramilitaries, having served as a part-time chaplain in Crumlin Road jail in the early 1970s. From 1992 until 2001, he was chairman of the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders.
Rev Good was also a member of the North's human rights commission. He has lectured in pastoral counselling and theology in Edgehill Christian Education Centre and Queen's University, Belfast.
He is currently a member of the Methodist council on social responsibility. Rev Good is married with five grown-up children and 12 grandchildren.
Fr Alec Reid
Over the past 20 years or more, Fr Alec Reid worked for peace quietly. That's the nature of the man. This Redemptorist priest, most often based in Clonard monastery in west Belfast, shuns the limelight. But when the definitive account of this period is written, Dublin-born and Tipperary-reared Fr Reid (74) will feature prominently.
He's not widely known, but people should remember the image of him saying a prayer over the virtually naked body of one of two British army corporals murdered by the IRA in west Belfast in 1988, in the week when the Gibraltar Three were buried, and Michael Stone attacked mourners, killing three men.
Peace then seemed very far away but, a couple of years earlier, Fr Reid had met then taoiseach Charles Haughey to tell him the republican leadership, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, was willing to embark on a peace process, that they believed the "war" had been fought to a stalemate.
Progress made subsequently would not have been possible if Fr Reid didn't believe then there was a genuine opportunity to end violence.
