The death of Dr Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam will be mourned with genuine and unusual sincerity in nationalist Ireland. More than any other Northern Ireland secretary in the last three decades, she was seen as having a particular empathy with nationalists and a more sympathetic understanding of their grievances and aspirations than most British politicians.
Without Mo Mowlam, the Belfast Agreement would still have come about, but the path would have been considerably more rocky. Prime Minister Tony Blair, acting in tandem with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, may have brought the talks to a successful conclusion on April 10th, 1998, but Mo Mowlam will be credited with having done her share of the spadework and with generating a fair amount of the good will.
There were initial doubts and reservations when she replaced Kevin McNamara as Labour's shadow Northern Ireland secretary in 1994, since Mr McNamara had been regarded as a friend to nationalists during good times and bad.
But Mo Mowlam's extrovert personality and dynamic approach to her new role quickly won people round. This was no colourless and faceless time-server, but a politician at the height of her powers who was fully engaged with the brief.
As one close observer put it: "She basically felt things had to be shaken up, that the status quo was not acceptable, and she brought a freshness and energy to her new role."
When she took office as secretary of state for Northern Ireland after Labour's landslide election victory in 1997 she threw herself into the job with gusto.
Her direct, no-nonsense approach had considerable popular appeal, and her quirky personality was seen even in her first walkabout in Belfast, when she grabbed a punter's apple and took a bite from it.
Her first big test was a minor disaster. She reportedly promised nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road in Portadown that she would tell them in advance if the annual Orange Order parade from Drumcree was being allowed to proceed through their area.
In the event, she failed to live up to her alleged promise, which was unsustainable from a security viewpoint, and there was much bitterness and disillusionment as a result. A well-timed leak of an internal document from the Northern Ireland Office appeared to confirm that she had acted in bad faith.
But she recovered from this setback and entered wholeheartedly into the negotiations which set Northern Ireland on the road to the Belfast agreement.
Her style, as always, was highly individual and informal. Although she could have had the unionist grassroots eating out of her hand, senior UUP politicians were immune to her charms. This was partly due to her assertive, in-your-face personality, but it also reflected unionist doubts and hesitations about the peace process in general.
Her success in Northern Ireland added to her popularity with Labour activists back home, and there was a widespread feeling, in the North and elsewhere, that her political decline was hastened by the fact that she seemed to have become more popular than Tony Blair himself.
Mo Mowlam never gave the impression that she was good on detail, and there were early signs of ill-health at a press conference in Stormont one morning when she appeared to think it was night-time. Officials who worked with her said she could be quite irritable when tired, and her forthright and direct ways made her prone to gaffes.
But she treated both sides in the peace process as equals rather than obeying the unwritten rule that the British government must always give unionists the benefit of the doubt, just as Dublin was meant to be a discreet cheerleader for nationalists.
She lacked both the patrician ways of a traditional Tory such as Sir Patrick Mayhew and the earthy political pugnacity of Labour's Roy Mason.
However, there was a definite sense of the prime minister edging her aside as things came to a crunch. This was attributed in part to political rivalry, but it may also have reflected some nervousness over her erratic ways. Clearly angered by her marginalisation, she reportedly told president Bill Clinton that she was "the tea-lady round here".
Such was her popularity in the Labour Party that she managed to "cheek" the prime minister by refusing to move in a reshuffle, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The lapse of judgment was evident when Tony Blair eventually moved her in October 1999 to the post of cabinet office minister, which she herself had described as "minister for the Today programme". Worse still, David Trimble leaked the news of her impending move in a briefing for journalists.
Her successor, Peter Mandelson, could not emulate her fabled "touchy-feely" approach but was probably no less effective in his own way.
Northern Ireland was undoubtedly the high point of Mo Mowlam's political career and she never scaled similar heights afterwards.