One of the last acts of Peter McLachlan, the former director of the Belfast Voluntary Welfare Society, who died on August 4th of prostate cancer, aged 62, was to urge David Trimble to find a way of implementing the power-sharing provisions of the Belfast Agreement on Northern Ireland.
Support for power-sharing remained a consistent theme of his life, and he embodied all that was best in Northern Irish civil society. Before becoming director of the Belfast Voluntary Welfare Society he had been its general secretary, and he was awarded the OBE in 1983. But what marked him out was the way that he moved so easily from Hillsborough Castle soirees to highly-stressed community groupings, Catholic and Protestant.
He was guided by a strong moral compass. His housing work brought him into contact with the brutalising, paramilitary intimidation within Catholic and Protestant working-class communities. Long before the advent of the Families Against Intimidation And Terror group, he played a role in spiriting young men out of harm's way.
The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, he was educated at Magdalen College School, and Queen's College, Oxford. After returning in 1973 to Northern Ireland, where he had family connections, he became a key figure of liberal unionism and a strong supporter of Brian Faulkner's attempt to establish a power-sharing executive with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party.
In 1973 he was elected as a Faulknerite unionist member for South Antrim in the Northern Ireland assembly.
He was always a realist; he confessed later that he had expected the 1973/74 power-sharing assembly to fail, as it did.
He had a highly active role in the assembly. "He was indefatigable: an inexhaustible source of questions, motions and legislative amendments. Such men are rare," wrote the former head of the Northern Ireland civil service, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield.
In August 1976 the Peace People emerged. Having its roots in nationalist West Belfast, the movement badly needed a unionist voice in its leadership.
Peter McLachlan threw himself in with vigour and panache, even if over time he, like others, found it hard to manage the internal tensions.
His 1980 resignation from the Peace People - they were divided as Northern Ireland moved towards the hunger strike crisis - marked the end of his strictly political career.
Brave, devoid of rancour, he refused to be embittered. In the last phase of his life he was drawn towards Quaker tenets.
His marriage was dissolved in 1992; his two daughters, Fiona and Heather, survive him.
Peter McLachlan: born 1936; died August, 1999
