The political calendar in Northern Ireland is packed with significant dates and anniversaries. July 1st is one such for unionists. In the context of the current political drama there was powerful imagery in Mr David Trimble's presence on a French battlefield this weekend - engulfed in thoughts of arms and men, war and sacrifice - as he paid tribute to the fallen of the Somme. He has returned to Belfast where, this morning, the Assembly will witness formal enactment of his resignation as First Minister. Mr Trimble's family, of blood and politics, will wonder what this moment portends for their futures in Northern Ireland. Beyond unionism, people in the nationalist and republican communities - North and South - also have occasion to consider afresh what kind of future they would choose.
Television coverage of the gathering crisis in Northern Ireland has shown repeated footage of the harrowing scenes outside Mr Trimble's constituency count at Upper Bann as he and his wife, Daphne, battled their way through a baying crowd. They have no wish for such visual reminders and will hardly forget the ugliness of that day. Yet it is important for the rest of us to be reminded of the journey on which Mr Trimble has taken unionism, and the price he has paid for it. On Good Friday, 1998, Mr Trimble gambled on the judgment that nationalists could be reconciled to Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom. He accepted that to win that prize unionists would first have to give. Inevitably many unionists concluded he gave too much.
Mr Trimble knew there would be pain - particularly over prisoner releases and reform of the RUC. But he could point to historic gains in the Belfast Agreement - the scrapping of the territorial claim to the North in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution. If predictable begrudgery greeted his Nobel Peace Prize, it enabled Mr Trimble to win an international audience for the case of unionism which his predecessors so foolishly ignored. On this side of the Border, too, Mr Trimble overcame personal and political prejudice to forge an unprecedented working relationship with the Taoiseach.
All politics, however, is local. Mr Trimble battled the constant suspicion in his own community that he had taken Sinn Fein into government on the back of an armed truce, during which the promise of IRA decommissioning would be used to win still more concessions for republicans. Mr Seamus Mallon confirmed this was never the basis of the understanding on which Mr Trimble emerged from the Mitchell Review and famously agreed to "jump first". Wisely or not from his own perspective, Mr Trimble took a second leap-of-faith at Hillsborough last May.
There is no blind faith now. Mr Trimble has discarded the safety harness. He will not return unless the IRA finally moves to put its weapons beyond use. They must do so; as they must know that the peace process actually requires a unionist leader of Mr Trimble's stature. The personalities will change if he has to go, but the problems will remain. The Ulster Unionist Party would do well to consider that point.