A historian has discovered a strong Longford connection to the late Lord David Trimble.
The former Northern Ireland First Minister and Nobel peace prize winner passed away yesterday following a short illness.
Castlepollard native Marie Coleman is a Professor of History at Queens University in Belfast.
She discovered the politician's grandfather George left Longford in 1895 to join the RIC.
Lord Trimble's Longford connection brings to two the number of key players from the county who were integral to the Northern Ireland peace process with Taoiseach Albert Reynolds playing a significant role in the Downing Street declaration and the first IRA ceasefire in the early 1990s.
Speaking to Let's Talk today, Professor Coleman says Irish history would be very different had the family stayed in the midlands:
''I just came across a reference in a biography of Lord Trimble to the Longford origins and then the name just kept coming up because there's only 200 Presbyterians in Longford around the start of the 20th century and there's only one or two Trimble's, so it wasn't too difficult to identify them. If George Trimble never left Longford would David Trimble have been Longford's first Taoiseach instead of Albert Reynolds?.''
