Obituary: Sir Oliver Napier, politician, lawyer, farmer

Politician and visionary who helped create peace through his courage and integrity

Sir Oliver Napier, politician, lawyer, farmer.

Born 11 July 1935, Belfast.

AS A politician, Sir Oliver Napier must have been doing something right during the Troubles in Northern Ireland : extremists on both sides of the political divide wanted him dead.

He was one of sectarianism's most vigorous opponents in his native Northern Ireland.

Terrorists sent men to his front door to murder him; they tried to lure him to meetings to shoot him; they burnt him out of his farm (twice); they poisoned his beloved cattle; they raked his house with gunfire; they kidnapped a schoolgirl they wrongly believed to be his daughter.

After one gun attack on his house, Napier and wife Briege rushed home. Their children asked what all the fuss was about; they had been watching a John Wayne film and thought the gunfire was cinematic.

Another would-be assassin who failed in his mission later told Napier he was glad he hadn't killed him, as he was a decent fella'.

After being burnt out of his farm, and realising he had to sell up, Napier put a For Sale notice in the local paper. It specified locals to whom the farm wasn't to be sold. The advert didn't say they had burnt him out. It didn't need to. They were shown up to be cowards and thugs. Sue him if they dared.

At the start of the Troubles, Napier surveyed a toxic and stagnant political landscape. He looked into a literal abyss that would spawn the Shankill Butchers and the Omagh bombing. But Napier didn't step back from the crumbling edge.

He instead did something for which so few have the vision, energy and intellect; something so rare that a half-century or more may pass before it is repeated; something of great personal risk but great social benefit: the formation of a new political party.

Alliance was born on 19 April 1970 thanks to the efforts of Napier and others. Its aim was to heal the bitter divisions in Northern Ireland by promotion of a non-sectarian agenda. Now, it sounds obvious. Then it was audacious, visionary, revolutionary.

Eighty-hour weeks followed as Napier juggled his day job as a solicitor and his family, while painstakingly trying to defuse a 5,345 square-mile political minefield that stretched the length the breadth of Northern Ireland.

Napier contested the 1979 general election in East Belfast. Many forecast Alliance were heading for victory in the predominantly Protestant constituency. But on the eve of the poll, a newspaper splashed with a story that Catholic Napier wanted to replace the national anthem with Danny Boy. It was a fabrication, a dirty trick. Napier lost by 928 votes out of almost 50,000 polled. Three days later, the newspaper published an apology, admitting the story was a falsehood.

There is no suggestion that the man who beat Napier, Peter Robinson, was responsible. But many perceived a great sense of political and poetic justice when, 31 years later, Alliance took East Belfast from Robinson in the 2010 general election. And Napier lived to see it.Napier played a key role in the Good Friday Agreement, advising Tony Blair that he had to keep the Protestants on board for it to be successful. He did and it was.

There was always the possibility that, after the agreement, Napier's Alliance party - in a longed-for non-sectarian society - would be made redundant. Nothing would have pleased him more.

He could be ruthless. Giving a speech against internment, he wiped the floor with a well-known Tory minister. Point by point, what the minister had said was addressed, dissected, dispatched. The coup de grace for each of his opponent's points was blunt-instrument oratory, three words: 'What bloody arrogance.' Again and again, 'What bloody arrogance' resounded. The minister squirmed. The crowd went wild.

But that killer instinct was combined with a belief in the dignity of debate and of your opponent, and the knowledge that "bloody arrogance" seldom achieves anything. His mantra was: allow your opponent an honourable way out when you have won the argument. Many men were offered an honourable way out by Napier.

Napier was knighted in 1985 but wore the honour lightly. At his wake, one of his grandchildren asked why the title was not inscribed on his coffin lid. He was told that when Napier went to his God, he wished to do so as a man, not a knight of the realm.

He loved Northern Ireland and embraced its idiosyncracies. As he explained to one visitor: here was the only place where one could tell a man's religion from the drink he took. Powers, Paddy's or Jameson's whiskey and you were almost certainly a Catholic, Bushmills and you'd be Protestant. He himself favoured Powers. With as much water again, a roaring fire, a newspaper or good company, and a Montecristo No.4 cigar.

Napier was a lifelong Celtic fan but attended his first Old Firm match comparatively late in life. Afterwards, when asked what it was like, he replied with enthusiasm: "It was naked sectarian hatred. Fantastic." His sense of humour was less than PC.

He was a man of some generosity, known to down-and-outs in Belfast. But requests for a few pence for a cup of tea were brushed off, and Napier would tell them he was only willing to supply a couple of quid for a pint.

Weeks before his death, Napier celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with Briege. He admitted he was as infatuated with her now as he had been in the early days of their courtship.

A friend once jokingly called Napier the most even-tempered man in Ireland for his forbearance of his children. They in turn accused their father of an anti-nepotism, but acknowledged his sense of fair play would not allow them to be given unfair advantage over others.Oliver Napier was born on 11 July 1935, the eldest son of Belfast solicitor James J Napier and Sheila Bready, and a descendant of the mathematician John Napier of Merchiston, inventor of logarithms.

His crowning political achievement was the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974 and he felt that the collapse of the executive was a major setback which cost thousands of lives. It was therefore with great joy that he welcomed the Good Friday Agreement, the successor to Sunningdale.

However, it was in his garden growing vegetables and teaching his children how to rear animals that he was happiest.

His dark humour and intellect were undiminished on his deathbed. His family heard him murmer "Charles". They believed it to be in reference to his infant son who predeceased him. But then Napier whispered: "Charles the second." Cue genealogical argument among the family as to who the second Charles might be. The conundrum was only solved by a visiting relative. Napier in fact meant King Charles II, who told his courtiers on his deathbed: 'I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such a time a-dying.'

Oliver Napier did make one uncharacteristic error. He would tell his children, to encourage them academically, that no-one remembers who didn't come first. He was utterly wrong.

Napier didn't come first in the 1979 poll. But as news of his death spread, thousands remembered him. The irony would not be lost on Napier.

Survived by wife Briege, eight children and 22 grandchildren.