Leadership Quote by Dick Spring

“It... is the best opportunity we’ve had in the last 25 years” is doing two jobs at once: it sells urgency and it quietly indicts everyone who let the previous 25 years congeal into a permanent emergency. Dick Spring’s phrasing frames peace not as a vague aspiration but as a rare opening in an otherwise locked system. The ellipsis matters too. It suggests a speaker stepping carefully around volatile specifics, aware that naming the wrong actor, grievance, or concession can collapse the moment.

As a politician in the Republic of Ireland, Spring is also triangulating audiences. To nationalists, “settlement” signals legitimacy and an end to humiliation; to unionists and to London, it implies order, durability, and the containment of violence. The genius is that “settlement” is both moral and administrative: a way to stop killing, and a way to finalize arrangements. It’s the kind of word that can carry contradictions without detonating them.

“Leave no stone unturned” is a familiar idiom, but in this context it becomes a pledge of political stamina: back-channel talks, prisoner issues, constitutional language, decommissioning, cross-border institutions - all the messy machinery that idealistic speeches avoid. The subtext is pragmatic and slightly chastening: peace isn’t waiting for a single grand gesture; it’s waiting for exhausting, unglamorous persistence.

Set against the late-20th-century arc of the Troubles, Spring’s line reads as a bet that fatigue and shifting geopolitics have finally made compromise thinkable. It’s less triumphal than careful: a warning that history is offering a narrow doorway, and that leaders will be judged if they don’t walk through it.