This and Monday’s 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, reminded me of one of the most thought-provoking field trips of my journalistic career. It took place almost exactly 29 years ago.

"You found it under the water then?" joked Jim Moore, after I had made my way into the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, a village on the road to Limavady near Northern Ireland’s north coast.

Peace had not yet come to the province, and the majority of my working days were spent covering the "Troubles", albeit mainly from Westminster.

I found myself rubbing shoulders frequently with the principal Northern Irish political leaders of the day, be they unionist or nationalist, figures such as John Hume and David Trimble, later to share the Nobel Peace Prize, James Molyneaux, Mark Durkan and the Reverend Ian Paisley.

Every once in a while, I would take the short flight to Belfast, into a different world.

Occasionally, these assignments would have a sporting dimension - I once went to see Dame Mary Peters, the Olympic pentathlon gold medallist from Munich 1972.

But it was my journey to the low, red-brick Rising Sun that taught me most about the sheer viciousness of civil war and the small but significant role sport can play in maintaining a bridge between even the most intractable divisions.

An estimated nine out of 10 inhabitants of Greysteel at the time of my visit were nationalist. But the Rising Sun was a mixed pub.

It followed that when, six months before my rendezvous with Moore, loyalist gunmen burst through the door and opened fire, five of the victims were Roman Catholics and two Protestants.

It was a shocking attack, even by the standards of the time, and it took the life of Jim Moore’s octogenarian father.

"They were standing right here, just inside the door," one customer told me - another pointed out the corner where he had dived for cover.

The pub had been the base for a cricket team.

This also straddled the sectarian divide, being around three-quarters nationalist, by one estimate.

Indeed, the quintessentially English sport had been played in the region for many years.

"I could show you a picture of the Greysteel team in 1901 with their bowler hats and things," according to one local.

Surely, you might imagine, the massacre would have put a stop to this, at least for some time.

Not so; it seemed the club was preparing for the new season as busily as the rain would allow, even though, I was told, some of the teams it was due to come up against in league matches would be exclusively Protestant.

Among the refurbished facilities that Moore - a left-handed all-rounder - proudly showed me was the cricket club meeting room.

When I visited the ground, with its view over Lough Foyle, I might have squelched across the outfield - this explained Moore’s "under the water" greeting - but it was otherwise in great shape.

"You can’t live in the past," said Moore, whose father had also at one time played for the Rising Sun as an opening batsman, in explanation of the club’s determination to carry on.

Liam O’Hara, a lawyer who had captained the club to victory in the North West Junior Cup in 1991, spoke over a pint of Guinness of the "subtle accommodations" players in the area were prepared to make.

"A man who plays cricket in order to spend time away from [home] and to drink five or six pints in the evening is not a man who is going to fight anybody," he said.

He went on: "There could be subtle accommodations in every area of life if there weren’t so many flag-waving politicians with vested interests.

"The people who play sport in general and cricket in particular don’t have any strong political views."

I left Greysteel reflecting on both the remarkable resilience of its war-weary inhabitants and the tenacity of the sporting instinct.

Four years later, the Good Friday Agreement, one of the most important diplomatic achievements of recent times, put an effective end to the violence - hopefully for good.