I have no doubt or regrets about what we did on Good Friday 1998, writes David Trimble, who helped create the agreement others then used to destroy his career but now seek to operate
I became fully involved in Northern Ireland politics in the winter of 1972/73, off the back of the worst year of the troubles when some 500 persons were killed. I had watched the situation deteriorate over a number of years with growing concern.
But it was the prorogation of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule that threatened to destabilise society. Like many unionists I expected direct rule to be followed by further major constitutional change imposed by London and many feared that London's aim was to drive us in the direction of a united Ireland.
The political turmoil was such that one unionist party leader publicly explored the proposition that it would be better to do a deal with Dublin and go in on our own terms than be forced in on those of others. One could only imagine the ferocious terms in which this idea would have been denounced had it been advanced by anyone other than Ian Paisley.
Over the 25 years that elapsed between the government's first experiment in 1973 and the multi-party agreement in 1998, there were many kites flown, deals that might have been and political initiatives that were counted fortunate if they did not make matters worse.
I remain of the opinion that of all of these, the one that was most favourable to unionism was Bill Craig's voluntary coalition proposal in the 1975 Constitutional Convention - my judgment on this not being affected by the fact that the talks on this were started by Paddy Devlin and myself.
It had been negotiated with the SDLP and, we thought, endorsed by the principal unionist party leaders, until, at the last moment, Ian Paisley decided that the idea of being in even a temporary coalition with John Hume and Gerry Fitt was unacceptable.
I remember at around that time a colleague saying that anyone could sketch on the back of an envelope the main features of the outcome to our political problem. Yet it was not until the late 1990s that we had the right combination of circumstances, the right people and the right opportunity to enable us to get a settlement across so many issues.
Despite the ups and downs in the years since Good Friday, April 10th, 1998, I have no doubt or regrets on what we did that day. We settled the basic constitutional issue in the only way possible for us, namely leaving it to be determined by the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum. It was the decision of the Irish government to add that a northern referendum alone would not be sufficient; that there would also need to be a separate referendum in the South to see if the inhabitants of the 26 counties wanted that lot up there to come in.
The once fraught issue of North-South co-operation was sorted by getting the architecture right and by setting that in place in a way that met the needs and sensitivities of the relevant parties. Since then no one has claimed that the union is in danger or that co-operation is a Trojan horse. The silence of the DUP on these matters is eloquent testimony to our success.
The post-1998 difficulties have been primarily within the North and relate to the difficulties that the extremes on each side of the community have had in coming to terms with the inevitable compromise which that agreement represented.
Republicans have described their policies as being initiated by their leadership. I do not doubt that, but they were less than frank with their membership about where those policies were going. They failed to tell their supporters that retaining an active private army was inconsistent with a commitment to exclusively peaceful means.
Crazy as it seems, I do think the leadership thought they could smuggle the IRA into the new dispensation. Governments and secretaries of state seemed prepared to acquiesce in this. I wonder if they realise the sort of society this would have produced if we had not been determined, sometimes alone, to insist upon the integrity of the agreement. Because governments bent the rules and fudged the issue, I used the only tool available to me. Three times I voluntarily put myself out of ministerial office in order to force republicans to move. And it worked.
By the time of our last extended negotiation with republicans in the autumn of 2003, we were discussing the completion of decommissioning, the winding up of the IRA, republican support for the police and participation in policing. In the event republicans preferred to wait to do business with the DUP, presumably because they felt they could get a better deal.
One very valuable product of that year's efforts was the creation of the Independent Monitoring Commission. Its rigour and integrity have been invaluable. Had there been such a body at the outset we might have seen the full implementation of the agreement within the two-year period envisaged in it. As it is we have had to wait nine years to see the completion of the transition.
Today's events in Belfast will finally see the full implementation of the Belfast Agreement. That agreement has not been changed in its essentials.
The DUP obtained a variation of the procedure for installing the first and deputy first ministers - so that they would not have to vote for the election of a Sinn Féin deputy first minister. But, contrary to the SDLP's fears, this has not changed the character of the office, which stems from the functions that they have to exercise jointly and from the political reality that these coalition partners have to develop a relationship to be able to exercise power.
Last week's photo of a smiling Paisley and McGuinness together with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso shows that the necessary relationship will develop. The DUP's predicted "battle a day" will join all the other slogans they have discarded along the way.
Opinion polls in 1998 indicated that a narrow majority of unionists endorsed the agreement. But within a few months, probably influenced by the unconditional prisoner release and republican rhetoric about "not an ounce not a bullet", a majority of unionists were opposed. Nevertheless the DUP were unable to capitalise on this in the 2001 election. Their pure anti-agreement slogans and bully-boy tactics did not persuade a sceptical unionist electorate to give anti-agreement unionists a majority within unionism.
The DUP had to change, to promise a new "fair deal" to get their nose ahead of the UUP in the 2003 election, and then consolidated their position with the help of the unionist revulsion at the government's weak response to the then biggest bank raid in British history.
All of which brings us to this week's hoped for closure. Republicans, who never wanted Stormont in the first place, will join with the DUP, who never wanted to share it with anyone, let alone them, because at the end of the day, the DUP had nowhere else to go and could not retain their electoral support if they did nothing. Some explanations remain outstanding, but candour is not likely.
• David Trimble, a former law lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast, was leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and Northern Ireland's first first minister in the first executive set up under the terms of the Belfast Agreement and shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume