Stephen Grimason on BBC TV on Good Friday 1998. In his hand is the text of the Belfast Agreement. Photograph: BBC Northern IrelandStephen Grimason, who has died aged 67 after a long illness, is the journalist who achieved a world scoop in being the first to obtain a copy of the Belfast Agreement. “I have it in my hand,” was how he famously heralded its publication.
The climax of those negotiations was Holy Week that early April and during those days from the Monday to the Good Friday, when the deal was done, the mood swung between guarded hope and despair. Still, he managed to produce the first public copy of the Belfast Agreement and to declare to Thompson and, in a sense, to the world, that agreement appeared imminent although it was more than three hours later before the deal was concluded. He never disclosed who gave it to him, noting, “A source is not just for Christmas.”Three years later he became director of communications for the Stormont Northern Executive, a post he held until 2016.
From a Protestant background, Grimason was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, in 1957. Later, his teachers told him he could have a future in journalism because he was “nosy” and “always causing trouble”. He started his career in 1975, working in the Lurgan Mail before moving to the Ulster Star in Lisburn and then joining the Banbridge Chronicle where aged 27 he became its editor. He joined the BBC in 1987.
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