Sir Trevor said that before arriving in Belfast he had “never heard a bomb go off” and “could hardly spell Kalashnikov”.
“Here I was thrown into this situation, but I learned a lot,” he said.
“There was almost a kind of aggression to the politics.
“There was a very strong kind of religious base to some of this. I remember once, I frequently said to my friends, I stumbled into an argument about mixed communities and mixed races and mixed areas and I hadn’t got hold of exactly what was happening.
“I said, I don’t understand what your problem was about mixed areas or mixed communities you know, and I said, ‘I have a mixed marriage, for example’ and they said ‘is your wife Catholic?’ I said, ‘no, she’s white’. But immediately you see, they thought there was a religious bias to everything. That was what I took away from those times.”
Sir Trevor also spoke about the trepidation he felt preparing to interview Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator.
“He had a pretty awful reputation,” he said. “Somebody told me, in fact, that there was one meeting at which some minister began to voice a disagreement about something with him. Saddam Hussein took the minister out, shot him, and continued the meeting as though nothing had happened.”
