The joint Nobel award to David Trimble and John Hume does not bear close comparison with apparently similar awards to main players in the South African and Middle East peace processes, although a similar gesture of encouragement may well be what the secretive Nobel Committee had in mind.
The fact is that John Hume stands above the political game in Northern Ireland, partly because no one has done more over 30 years to establish the rules of the game itself, and partly because he has recently ceded the frontline role to Seamus Mallon.
On the other hand, David Trimble is right in the thick of the continuing battle within unionism itself; and the effect of his elevation is decidedly the more interesting in that regard. Had John Hume received the award on his own, few but the predictable suspects would have quibbled.
The redoubtable Gregory Campbell was quick to blame the new laureate for virtually starting the Troubles with the civil rights movement. But outside of the DUP, with its roots in what was then the Protestant Unionist Party, organising counter-demonstrations to legal civil rights marches, few unionists today would attempt to defend the democratic record in Derry, where one-third of the population could elect two-thirds of the councillors at a time when local councils had very considerable powers over housing, transport, education and a variety of municipal jobs.
And when the civil rights movement began to lose its moral authority and its non-violent character with the wildcat Burntollet march, John Hume was quick to turn his formidable energies to the parliamentary arena. I must say at once that I have diverged, with undiminished respect, from Hume ever since he decided in 1970 to establish what became the SDLP on the old Nationalist Party bases.
A social democratic party which would easily have subsumed the old nationalist constituencies and simultaneously appealed to what was called at the time moderate Protestant opinion could have provided an alternative party of government, especially at a time when Ian Paisley was tearing out the underbelly of the old unionism.
The strategy of maximising the nationalist vote under the somewhat false colours of the SDLP left enlightened unionism with nowhere to go except the Alliance Party, which, in politics based predominantly on ethnicity, was effectively nowhere at all. The first attempt at power-sharing gave no time for unionism to realign, and, in the ruination of Brian Faulkner, scared mainstream unionists back into the trenches for another 20 years.
But John Hume demonstrated extraordinary persistence and prodigious energy in pursuing his chosen form of conflict resolution, culminating in the Belfast Agreement. Along the way, he has established a formidable network of contacts among the powerful on both sides of the Atlantic, and he, more than anyone, drove the power-sharing approach to its present hopeful state.
It should provide stability, and that is a long way better than endemic violence. But the price paid is that Northern Ireland politics, for the foreseeable future, places ethnicity above humanity, and indeed above democracy as normally understood. Can you imagine having to register as Asian or Caribbean in Manchester in order to claim your proportionate say in the city council?
The stability is welcome, but genuine peace and genuine democracy are still a long way off, and the premium placed on registering as either unionist or nationalist could cause a similar freezing of progress that the Republic endured during two generations of the quasi-tribal antipathy of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
Paradoxically, now that John Hume is, via the secular canonisation of the Nobel Prize, formally elevated above the tribal political battle, we may actually see the very best of him. His early work in creating the credit union and the Foyle salmon co-operative is the key to appreciating his commitment to a politics of self-help and self-respect.
He has long been a post-nationalist figure, in spite of being seen as a nationalist leader; and freed from localised restraints, he may use his enormously enhanced status far from the petty squabbles of Northern Ireland.
The Nobel laureates in recent years have been acting collectively and catalytically on a number of issues, including the proposed United Nations Decade for Non-Violence to mark the beginning of the new millennium, with the first year being a Year of Peace.
John Hume would be a powerful addition to that group, and one can imagine his welcome from such as Oscar Arias, the Costa Rican laureate and former president, who has been campaigning for arms trade controls. Hume's influence in the corridors of US power, hitherto focused on resolving Northern Ireland's conflict, might be brought to bear on US involvements in Burma, Indonesia/East Timor and so on.
His ability to assist in such matters as the ethnic conflicts in eastern Europe would also be formidable. In short, the man who was widely mentioned as a possible UN secretary-general, could find that he might prove more effective as a Nobel laureate. He has the ability and the compassion, and the Nobel Prize gives him a remarkable moral authority in his own right, without reference to any institution or state, to give full rein to his energy.
David Trimble is a totally different kind of political figure, emerging slowly from the narrow trench of the old right-wing Vanguard Party into mainstream unionism. It was with his election to Westminster that his horizons seemed to broaden, and he began to see how the rest of the world, including the London to which unionists would be so loyal, looked on unionism and unionists.
He could see that, for instance, John Hume was warmly welcomed and respected as an equal, whereas unionists were seen as a kind of a throwback, and he began to foster a more vigorous approach to presenting the unionist view. I remember noting, incidentally, when Mr Trimble was running around the Drumcree churchyard three years ago, trying to maintain some semblance of decorum in that bizarre situation, that he reminded me of John Hume running around the Bogside in the early 1970s, trying to dampen down the anger, while remaining very much with his outraged people.
It was a mark of leadership in both cases, however the outside world might have viewed them. But it was with his succession to James Molyneaux that Trimble really showed growth. Where the latter declined to join the procession to Washington on the grounds that he would look like a dull dog beside the representatives of terrorism, Trimble grasped such opportunities with enthusiasm.
So far, even at the crunch point of signing the Belfast Agreement, he has not staked out a leadership position significantly ahead of his party. But his stature has grown and his confidence with it. Now, with the Nobel award, unionism has, for the first time in 30 years, a positive face to the world, and a leader who can be welcomed and respected in cosmopolitan company.
In psychological terms, that is enormously important for the unionist community, even if it is not entirely a conscious phenomenon for many. The real crunch could come should Trimble try to emulate Hume and take a position his party is not prepared for.
With Hume, it was the unilateral decision to talk to Gerry Adams. With Trimble, it could be bringing Adams into government before decommissioning has started. David Trimble has shown the capacity to do for unionism what John Hume has done for nationalism: he has the makings of unionism's first comparable champion to the SDLP leader.
Maybe, in their obscure way, the Nobel committee did get it right after all.
In 1976 Ciaran McKeown co-founded the Peace People with Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, the latter two being awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. He works as a sub-editor with the Belfast News Letter
