“He wasn’t the kind of person who ever greeted you,” Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese says of David Trimble, who was a law student at Queen’s University when Trimble was a lecturer.

But on this day he did. He was seeking people out and telling them it was a “wonderful day”. The day was the Monday after Bloody Sunday and McAleese believed she knew why. “It wasn’t actually a reference to the day at all but a reference to the day before.”

On Free State today, the real David Trimble is revealed by Stephen Walker, who has just published a biography of the man.

How did Trimble move from the figure who was “nakedly sectarian” and celebrating Bloody Sunday to the man who did so much to deliver peace? What happened to him in, as McAleese told Walker, “the hot-red forge of life” to change how he viewed the world? And what lessons can be learned from him today?

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