Last week in Britain an opinion poll asked Joe Public how he felt about the Belfast Agreement. Now before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's be clear about Joe Public's general view of Northern Ireland.

He wishes it didn't exist, he wishes he didn't have to think about it, he vaguely approves of Mo and Tony rushing around talking about peace and he hopes it's all been sorted out now and that he'll never have to think of it again. He knows the Belfast Agreement involved making a deal with terrorists and he didn't like it, but Joe's a pragmatist so he accepted it.

Joe hasn't read the Belfast Agreement, but he vaguely knows that what was involved was that in exchange for giving up terrorism, Gerry Adams and his chaps would have their prisoners let out, not have to answer for their past sins and be treated as if they had been democrats all their lives.

Joe is suspicious of Adams, but he was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Because Joe is fundamentally bored with the whole issue, he has not been keeping up with the political arguments. He saw that the nationalist chap who talks a lot about peace shared the Nobel Prize with the unionist chap who seems a lot more reasonable than that awful Paisley fellow.

However, it is beginning to impinge on him that the chap with the beard isn't keeping his side of the bargain. Last week Gallup asked Joe a few questions about Northern Ireland. As he usually does, Joe struggled to be fair-minded. A third of Joe said Northern Ireland's culture should be less British. More than half of him said the RUC should be substantially reformed. An astounding 83 per cent of him thought the government was right to talk to armed terrorists, and 59 per cent thought Northern Ireland was moving towards peace.

But then Joe was asked if he thought the IRA had permanently renounced terrorism, and 71 per cent of Joe thought they hadn't, which is why 70 per cent of him thought Sinn Fein should not be allowed to participate in government until all weapons were decommissioned. Terrorist organisations should decommission their weapons at once, said 89 per cent of Joe, and until they did, 74 per cent of him thought the prisoner releases should be stopped. What's more, 45 per cent of him thought the government was soft on terrorism.

Joe, as usual, is demonstrating what Walter Bagehot called the Englishman's "roundabout common sense". Not having been drawn into the minutiae of the decommissioning argument and not having paid attention to the propaganda of Sinn Fein, its fellow travellers and a gaggle of gullible hacks, Joe knows that the spirit of the Belfast Agreement required the weapons to be destroyed before paramilitary fronts could claim the democratic perks. Perhaps because he is so distant from the squabbles, Joe has not lost the plot.

Joe's not interested in legal nitpicking. He knows that the reason why half the unionists accepted the Belfast Agreement was because they thought that in exchange for many concessions, republicans would give up their arms. He knows too that the reason why the other unionists rejected the agreement was because they thought they wouldn't.

And now it seems that the anti-agreement unionists were right and David Trimble may have been betrayed. In his column in these pages last Wednesday, Vincent Browne produced an unjust attack on Trimble which got me mad. But just as I was putting finger to keyboard on Saturday I read Dermot Meleady's splendid letter, which destroyed Browne's arguments by pointing out inter alia his double standards where John Hume and David Trimble are concerned and the curious contradiction between his high-minded opposition to Democratic Left being in government because of its history and his relaxed attitude to unionists being in government with people with surface-to-air missiles and loads-a-Semtex.

What I want to focus on is Browne's accusation that David Trimble lacks courage. There are all kinds of criticisms one could level at David Trimble, including his inability to cultivate journalists, but to accuse him of a lack of courage is about as reasonable as to accuse Bertie Ahern of lacking the common touch.

I knew Trimble well enough not to have been surprised that when he became leader of the UUP he outraged hardliners by going to Dublin for talks and by calling for the severance of the link between his party and the Orange Order. Nor was I surprised when he took the huge gamble of going into the talks against the opposition of the DUP and the UK Unionists. When he accepted the agreement in the teeth of opposition from most of the youngest and brightest of his party, the people whom he relied on to be the modernisers of unionism, I began to worry that his courage was bordering on recklessness.

When he soldiered on through the referendum campaign when all observers thought unionism would say "No", I marvelled at his endurance. And when he held his nerve when it was being predicted everywhere that the SDLP would be the largest party in the assembly, I concluded that he was one of the bravest people I had ever encountered. My hope is that he's not actually foolhardy, which he will be if he lets republicanism off the decommissioning hook and thus commits political suicide. Make no mistake about it, suicide is what it would be. Last Monday, when the Taoiseach's 33-strong caravan went to Belfast, Trimble's party was the only unionist non-paramilitary voice against a phalanx of nationalists. I feared once again that Trimble was too trusting of Bertie Ahern, but then, later in the week, Ahern showed his "roundabout common sense" by demanding movement on decommissioning. Ahern has a sense of fairness and he knows well that unlike the Provos, Trimble has been anxious to honour the spirit as well as the letter of the agreement.

I have worried, too, that Trimble reposes too much trust in Blair. But fortunately, since Blair is obsessed with the views of Joe Public, he will be thinking hard about Joe's view that prisoner release should be halted until decommissioning begins. One last thought for Vincent Browne. David Trimble stayed in politics after Edgar Graham, his best friend and an academic colleague at Queen's, was murdered by the IRA for the crime of being tipped as a future leader of unionism. He has been a target for one set of paramilitaries or another for 20 years. I find it inappropriate that he should be accused of cowardice by someone leading a comfortable existence in a safe country.