IT was 2007 and the fledgling power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland was seeking support and legitimacy.

In successive choreographed phone calls the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland respectively, invited the newly-elected First Minister of Scotland to address the Stormont Assembly.

I went and I delivered an address in the Senate chamber finely tuned to upset as few apple carts as possible. But what I saw was amazing. The press reports of a rapport between the First Minister and his Deputy were underestimated.

In private, the relationship was already deeply personal, even avuncular, between Paisley and the younger man.

In the evening, in the great halls of Stormont, there was a carefully balanced melody of Irish and Scots-Irish traditional music boasting both pipers and flautists!

And there amid the flute band there was a Lambeg Drum – a very symbol of the Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland.

All day, I had been looking for a photo to encapsulate progress in an atmosphere where handshakes were still problematic and pictures – like phrases – make history in Ireland.

“You wouldn’t usually be so close to one of these drums?” I turned to Martin McGuinness and asked.

“100 yards, protesting” was the response he gave me.

“Ah,” I said. “It would be something if you and Ian were to beat it together would it not?”

Five minutes later, after a hastily summoned confab, the deed was done. Me behind the drum and Paisley and McGuinness with a drumstick each.

It was in the days before pictures went viral. Nowadays, it would have been a certainty.

I thought of that picture yesterday when news came through of Martin McGuinness’s passing and the reaction to it.

In the responses to his death, some were caught in the hurt of the past but some were overcoming it.

It is impossible to criticise those who lost so much, but some of those who lost the most were among those paying the most generous tributes.

Ian Paisley jnr MP’s thought of yesterday that “we are not judged by where we begin but by where we end up” has a more than a Presbyterian ring to it. However, it is a truth which I firmly and intimately recognise.

The reality there would have been violence in Northern Ireland with or without Martin McGuinness but peace only with him.

He was warm, engaging and witty and, as a hard man, uniquely placed to find the path to peace.

Deeply religious, Martin (like Big Ian) used to end phone conversations with the words “God bless” – and he meant it.

He would be aware of the ultimate fates of the peacemaker compared to those who wreak division in their own house. In Ian Paisley, he found a coalition and a soulmate. Both are now gone and so from politics are a generation of Westminster leaders who understood at first hand the heavy penalty that is visited on all of us from neglect of Northern Ireland.

The current Prime Minister seems totally oblivious to her responsibilities and her relationship with all of the devolved administrations is, at best, distant.

The post-election talks are stalemated and the omens are not good. The Brexit event is casting its long shadow, like a nuclear winter, over politics.

We have to hope the parties of the north realise that real progress can only come from within.

In my opinion they should follow the example of Paisley and McGuinness and beat the Lambeg Drum – beat it loud but together.