Mary McAleese on … John Hume

“I think John Hume was a great genius. He was standing on Daniel O’Connell’s shoulders and he could see the landscape way, way ahead, and he also could see how to get to it. But people who were standing on the ground with their heads down could see nothing. They just couldn’t see what he could see. That’s what great leaders do, they push out into the deep and they show us that they we are not going to drown.”

… On David Trimble

“I knew him as a lecturer in my days at Queens. He and I had been candidates for the same job at one stage, Director of the Institute of the Professional Legal Studies, and he was not at all happy when I got it. That said, precisely because he came out of that tradition of strong anti-nationalist opinion, to see where he was able to move to, to see where he was able to bring Unionism to, that took huge courage and he paid a really tough price for that courage.”